Blogs

Under Construction: the best (& worst) relics of GeoCities

Submitted by Admin on Mon, 10/26/2009

And so ends another epoch of the internet - the proto-social network/webhosting 90's mainstay GeoCities shut down today. One interesting archiving project preserved a particularly interesting set of relics, a goldmine for webmasters looking for some classic retro graphics: 100s of completely cheesy "under construction" images from unfinished/abandoned GeoCities pages that were archived before yahoo flipped the switch and shutdown GeoCities. Rather like Times Square at night, it has to been seen to be believed: http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/

I'll take that to go, thanks

Submitted by Admin on Tue, 09/15/2009

On the heels of Twitter's recent noisemaking about "you own your tweets" and contrary to a rather amusing report in the Onion about Google's opt-out policy, our pals in Mountain View (or more specifically, Chicago in this case) are working on making it easier to leave without leaving your data behind. Check out Google's Data Liberation Front for more info on how to get your goodsout of gmail, blogger, youtube, google apps and a host of other services in the google cloud.

Amazon's Ironic Saga Continues

Submitted by Admin on Thu, 09/03/2009

In what was possibly the year's greatest moment of internet irony, back in July Amazon remotely deleted copies of George Orwell's "1984" that Amazon had managed to sell illegally. The real beauty of this comes out in the second part of the letter: Now they're offering to redeliver the copy of 1984 - the same one they removed, complete with all your annotations. So let me get this straight: First they barge into your Kindle and take away something you already paid for (personal notes and all) - because they didn't have the legal right to sell it to you - and now, over a month later, they offer to pay a house call to your Kindle again, and put it back (complete with your personal notes that they've evidently been saving for just such a rainy day)??!?!? Way to go, Big Bro!

Is the sky falling?

Submitted by Admin on Wed, 09/02/2009

Wondering what happened to your gmail on Tuesday afternoon? Here's the official word from the googleplex on the matter. A bit less vague than the usual cloud-computing/SaaS outage explanations - and technically plausible, too. Let's just hope they're going to do what they said, and not just talk the talk. While it's not great news that this happened (would of been nice if they'd proactively built in enough headroom to avoid this sort of thing) it's certainly no cause for alarmist, Chicken Little reactions like this (seriously? was this ghost written by a Microsoft PR flack?) - just remember, a whole lot worse things have happened to Windows mail servers, and oftentimes, when/if they come back online, there's no mail from during or before the outage... Whatever the case, I've been using google apps (and gmail) since it rolled out, and am generally quite content with and confident about the service - this incident didn't really ruffle my feathers.