[NetBehaviour] Explore a Map of the Vintage Internet Metropolis (fwd)

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Before there was MySpace, there was GeoCities, the vast
metropolis of glitchy amateur websites, pulsating with gif
animations, that were the hub of digital culture for
countless late-'90s teens. If you haven't found yourself in
some cobweb-coated corner of the internet in a while and
landed on one of their sites, that's because Yahoo shut down
U.S. GeoCities two years ago, just 10 years after acquiring
it for $3.57 billion at the height of the dot-com boom.

Pained by the potential loss of the record of 35 million
participants' personal expression, the Internet Archive Team
launched a project to save the GeoCities data for posterity,
releasing a 641-GB torrent file worth of GeoCities data on
the one year anniversary of its closing last October. Now
this year, Dutch information designer Richard Vijgen
(http://www.richardvijgen.nl/) has plotted that data along a
scrollable world map of all those ancient GeoCities. He's
calling it The Deleted City (http://www.deletedcity.net/),
"a digital archaeology of the world wide web as it exploded
into the 21st century." It lives as an interactive
touchscreen data visualization.

The project gives a visual representation to the change in
thinking and living through the internet that we've
undergone in the past decade and a half. Before the internet
was understood as a (social) network, GeoCities conceived of
it as a city, where "homesteaders" could build on a digital
parcel, grouped in "neighborhoods" based on topic.
(Celebrity oriented sites were grouped together in
"Hollywood," for example.)Â  The Deleted City replicates
this logic by organizing the old websites along an urban
grid. Thematic "neighborhoods" that had more content
associated appear bigger. As you wander the city, you can
zoom in to get more detail, and eventually locate individual
html sites.


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