Ghost Sites

[Tom]

See Ghost Sites (http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/index.shtml). Steve Baldwin has collected screenshots of the homepages of the famous Dead Dotcoms. Many of them were taken on the day they announced their closure. The gallery holds about 1,000 'Ghosts' and most have a Web Elegy explaining what went wrong and why. Here is his comment on perhaps the most famous crash: 'So much has been written about the fate of Boo.com by self-aggrandizing insiders and stunned and incredulous outsiders that I would suggest that the metatags on its home page, viewable by doing a "view source" on the Boo.com home page saved at the Internet Archive, present a far more eloquently compact view of what this unbelievably expensive, ambitious, flawed Web shopping portal was trying to do during its brief run in the limelight'. Boo was started by 3 Swedes: a poet a model and a banker. Boo was started by 3 Swedes: a poet a model and a banker. They raised $135m from venture capitalists and investors to sell sports and fashion goods, but only ever got back $1m through sales. Those were the days my friends.

Note Baldwin's reference to the Internet Archive http://web.archive.org/ which tries to maintain a historic archive of websites. You can, for example, see the original University of Greenwich 1997 Homepage (http://web.archive.org/web/19980626221632/www.gre.ac.uk/index.shtml) or the 2000 Cadtutor.co.uk (http://web.archive.org/web/20040205221623/http://www.watson.u-net.com/cadtutor/) design.