Geocities Will Cease To Exist After Tomorrow

While this isn't really that big of a story from the standpoint that Geocities hasn't really been relevant for some time now and hence Yahoo!'s decision to pull the plug and delete the entire site, from a purely historical point of view it is interesting. Geocities was one of the first services to offer web users a home for their own sites, and let me tell you many of those sites were real beauties. It may have contributed to this whole self publishing world that we now live in.

According to Computer World Blog "In April 2009, Yahoo announced that GeoCities would cease accepting new registrations in preparation of the service's closing. In June, they clarified: the service would shut down on Oct. 26, 2009. As their FAQ states, GeoCities is not being decommissioned — it's being deleted. That means any data not personally backed up by its owners or readers will not be recoverable, ever."

Rest in peace Geocities and your users' over use of the blink tag, may we never be subjected to those neon colour schemes again.

20 Years Since Web Invisioned By Berners-Lee

20 years ago today Tim Berners-Lee published his "Information Management: A proposal" and the rest is history. Here is an interesting snip from his modest conclusions:

"We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities."

"The aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards. The result should be sufficiently attractive to use that it the information contained would grow past a critical threshold, so that the usefulness the scheme would in turn encourage its increased use."

I think he's more than achieved his goal!

Web History - another reason to love google!

Google has created another tool that I love! Web History works only if you have a Google account, but why wouldn't you? It's free and packed with cool tools! Once you've signed up and have granted the tool the right to call home, Web History keeps tabs on all of your Google searches. Want to find that cool sight you discovered a month ago? Log into your Google account, select Web History, and you're on your way. Big deal my browser can do that! True but this assumes that you are on the same computer that you used to conduct the original search... the real beauty of this tool is that you can log into Google from any computer, anywhere, and see your combined searches whether they were conducted at your work place, your home, your laptop... you get the idea. The interface is a familiar blog style listing with an intuitive calendar that displays the dates you searched with a colour coded frequency indicator, the more searches you conducted the darker the green, if you didn't search the day displays with a white background. You can manage your search history by removing items you don't care to see any more and there is a very cool trends page that shows you statistics about your searching habits like the time of day or day of the week that you search the most. As if that weren't enough! you can also add a bookmarking feature to your browser's link section so your bookmarks can follow you around as well.