The Importance of Place
GeoCities is the canonical example of "Rented Land." Users believed they were building homes (Homesteads); Yahoo! believed they were storing files. When the business model failed, the landlord evicted 38 million tenants with little warning.
The Archaeological Legacy
Today, GeoCities exists only as fragmented Umbrabytes (mirrors like Oocities) and Petribytes (corrupted files). It serves as:
- A Warning: That no platform is too big to fail.
- A Blueprint: For human-scale, amateur, and expressive web design ("folk art of the web").
- A Catalyst: The event that birthed modern Digital Archaeology.