Post #2 Letter to the Hartford Advocate

When I peeked at the honor box on the corner and learned from the cover of the Advocate that GeoCities was dead, my first thought was about how much trouble it would be for the workers at City Steam Brewery to scrape the stickers off the glass of the restaurant's front doors. Then I double-checked, and it turned out that those stickers were for CitySearch. I suppose my mistake speaks to a lack of brand awareness that contributed to the death of GeoCities.

Let’s face it. We think of Internet enterprises as here-today-gone-tomorrow entities without enough of a foothold in what has been come to be called "meatspace" (formerly RL, for "real life") to capture the public's imagination or guarantee themselves any longevity. As a person who never visited GeoCities on purpose, I'm still trying to figure out if it was one of those annoying sites that hogged the first ten pages of a Google search when all I wanted was a quick peek at the website or menu of my favorite restaurant. No, I'm probably thinking of CitySearch.

Did the GeoCities "neighborhoods" have any correspondence to real neighborhoods? Maybe something like this exists, but what I'd like to see is an Internet culture/business/activities site that works like a map, organized by real states and cities and neighborhoods, with real neighbors contributing bits on the lore, the history, the culture, and yes, the shopping and dining, of the street where they live. Of course, who's going to want to put their precious free time into building and contributing to such a thing if its economic model turns out to be unviable, if the internet winds shift as they inevitably do, or if some Yahoo comes along, buys the whole thing out and then proceeds to drive it into the ground?

No, what I would like to see is have Community Colleges across the country become hosting nodes for this kind of an enterprise, because they would have more of a vested interest in storing culturally significant content without regard to profit motive. They could also mobilize the free labor of their students to research the history, culture, nightlife etc. of a given area. It seems that Community Colleges are perfectly situated to do this because of the whole "community" thing -- they serve a local constituency, are relatively stable entities not totally dependent on the whims of the market, and are spread out all across the country. If all of these institutions got on the same page, they could create a WPA Guide for the new millennium, and while they're at it, bring all the content of those FDR-era WPA Gguides online at their respective sites, update them (a “then and now” feature?) and in so doing become an Internet destination for the ages.

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