For a lot of us manning blogs today, our first exposure to owning our own parcel of electronic landscape was GeoCities. Founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner in 1994, it was pretty much the first free web hosting site, as well as an early precursor to targeted marketing via its neighborhood system.  By 1997, it had grown to be the fifth-largest traffic portal on the web with over a million active users.  Then, in 1999, Yahoo! bought it for $3.57 billion dollars in stock and promptly lost interest.  Now, GeoCities is closing.

A whole massive piece of Internet history is going to be wiped out.  There are people at work as we speak, trying to archive GeoCities and all its various nooks and crannies, but they won’t be able to capture that much information.  No one knows exactly how big GeoCities is save Yahoo, and obviously they’re not going to be much help.

How GeoCities is disappearing is one of the biggest crimes against history since the burning of the Alexandria library.  Yes, that’s some serious hyperbole as I’m comparing ancient scrolls to webpages dedicated to dogs, but 99% of everything ever written is complete garbage.  It’s that crucial 1% that makes the 99% worth saving.

Tags: GeoCities, free web hosting, Yahoo, GeoCities closing, Internet history, David Bohnett, John Rezner

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