Transcript of the Future Tense episode ‘Rescuing GeoCities’.

Participants

• Jon Gordon
• Jason Scott

Transcript

Jon Gordon: Rescuing GeoCities. This is Future Tense from American Public Media; I’m Jon Gordon. Yahoo! said last week that it would shut down its GeoCities personal website service later this year. Hard to believe now, but Yahoo! paid about three billion dollars for the company back in 01999. You may recall that GeoCities allowed users to design personal websites, but the pioneering service has long since been eclipsed by blogs and social networks.

So what’s going to become of the million-plus GeoCities homepages out there? Yahoo! is saying only that it will provide details later this summer on how customers can save their own data. Jason Scott believes GeoCities deserves saving. Scott runs TEXTFILES.COM, a site that’s devoted to computer history. He’s lead organizer for a new group called the Archive Team, which is working to save a growing body of endangered Internet content, including GeoCities.

Jason Scott: A lot of sites that attracted attention over the past fifteen to twenty years of the web have been shut down — sometimes abruptly. And we’re at a point right now where so many people are willingly putting data that they create and they own online in other locations, and then these companies, right now, feel no mandate to hold this for very long, once they decide for whatever reason to take it down. These data locations have no sense of responsibility — it’s not shameful for a company to just turn off fifteen years of community memory.

JG: What is it about GeoCities that makes you want to do this? What is the potential value in saving GeoCities?

JS: GeoCities had a reputation — though the late ’90s and certainly the early twenty-first century — of being kind of the dumping ground for people who didn’t know what they were doing: a lot of websites that were ugly, that weren’t well-written, that were boring and so on. But in point of fact, it’s a beautiful snapshot of an entire population coming online for the first time. And now that online life has becoming the norm, certainly in developed countries, it represents this turning point.

JG: So how are you actually saving all these GeoCities sites?

JS: So, we’re doing things like checking websites to see if people link to GeoCities, we’re doing Google searches to find the names of different GeoCities sites, and we’re just trying to capture as much as can. We know there’s a lot, but we’re just kinda stepping through. And my attitude is similar to if you’re trying to rescue things from a burning house, which is: you run around and grab the five or ten things or more that you can carry, and run out. And that’s not everything you own, but at least you got something.

JG: So what do you intend to do with all this material?

JS: It’s not entirely clear to me what to do with the material after rescuing it. I don’t really think of it that way. I like to be the guy who, at that historical point, at the historical point we’re in, I said ‘Let’s grab a copy’. And in maybe a year or ten years, someone will say ‘Man, I’m really glad somebody was there to do that, because it turns out this was an important piece of information — we could not have known it back then, in 02009, but here in 02019, it’s so vital that we have it.’

JG: Jason Scott with the Archive Team; more information at archiveteam.org. This is Future Tense; I’m Jon Gordon.

On lifestreams

Those are the goals of our lifestream (or “information beam”) project. In our view of the future, users will no longer care about operating systems or computers; they’ll care about their own streams, and other people’s. I can tune in my stream wherever I am. I can shuffle other streams into mine — to the extent I have permission to use other people’s streams. My own personal stream, my electronic life story, can have other streams shuffled into it — streams belonging to groups or organizations I’m part of. And eventually I’ll have, for example, newspaper and magazine streams shuffled into my stream also. I follow my own life, and the lives of the organizations I’m part of, and the news, etc., by watching the stream flow.

On document previews

My desktop might be crammed with icons, but the icons tell me basically nothing about what’s inside the corresponding files, apps, and so on. My file system, mailer and net search engine return mainly lists of words; I have to read them line by line.

Compare that to how I search my office for a document. My visual sense is key. I remember roughly where I put the document and what it looks like. Or compare this to how I interact with a magazine stand: my visual sense guides me to things that interest me. Once I’ve got a magazine in hand, I can flip through it and find what’s interesting.

If info-beams weren’t visual and browsable, they’d be worthless. Each element in the stream must show you a compressed visual summary of its document; when you touch a stream element, you instantly get a larger visual summary.

This interview took place in 02003, several years before technology like Quick Look was released.