I still remember my old Geocities account.. My first experiments with HTML, full of frames, tables, and blink tags. And I wasn’t alone, millions of people cut their teeth on the web via Geocities pages that broke every design rule and tricked browsers into going far beyond their design intent. Sadly (thankfully?) Geocities is gone, replaced by MySpace, FaceBook, and Twitter, but before it disappeared one group decided to mine it. This video is the result of their massive 650Gig dataset, visualized as a City.
In an heroic effort to preserve 10 years of collaborative work by 35 million people, the Archive Team made a backup of the site just before it shut down. The resulting 650 Gigabyte bittorrent file is the digital Pompeii that is the subject of an interactive excavation that allows you to wander through an episode of recent online history.
The Deleted City from deletedcity on Vimeo.
