Archiving GeoCities: my full interview with Jason Scott

Posted by on . 3 comments.

About a year ago, Yahoo shut down GeoCities. Before the site was shuttered forever, a group called the Archive Team decided to grab as much GeoCities content as possible. They got almost a terabyte, and now plan to release it all as a torrent.

My CBC Radio tech column this Tuesday will be about GeoCities, The Archive Team, and web ephemera. As research, I interviewed Jason Scott of textfiles.com, one of the minds behind the Archive Team.

Due to time restraints, I usually only play short clips from my interviews on-air. But this was so interesting, I asked Jason for his permission to post our whole chat on this site. He agreed, so here it is (runs 58:12):

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[mp3j track="MP3 download@http://blip.tv/file/get/Dmisener-JasonScottInterview888.mp3" volslider="y" style="outline"]

Filed under: CBC, tech

Comments

  1. Rob Mauchel says:
    November 2, 2010 at 3:10 pm

    My first thought on hearing you talk about this on the radio was that the effort was redundant since archive.org has been doing it for years for as much of the web overall as they can manage. But upon checking, I see they stopped doing geocities back in 2001, presumably because they couldn't justify the quantity of data for a single domain anymore.

    So under the circumstances, it would seem these guys were justified in their efforts, but it's still surprising there's no mention in any of the press on this story how archive.org would otherwise be the best place to turn for such archival copies of any other part of the web!

    Reply
    • Dan Misener says:
      November 8, 2010 at 10:23 pm

      Hi, Rob. Indeed, archive.org does some pretty terrific work, and I'm a big fan of their Wayback Machine tool. I agree that they're worth recognizing in the "digital heritage" space.

      Reply
  1. ASCII by Jason Scott / A Torrent of Attention says:
    November 4, 2010 at 12:39 pm

    [...] mentioning the situation, for example Infosec Daily has the story at the end and Dan Misener did a recorded interview with me that was so much fun and got the message across so clearly that it’s actually included in the [...]

    Reply

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