Yahoo! officially announced the closing of their web hosting service, GeoCities, on October, the 26th, 2009.
It is like attending a funeral service for a nasty, despicable relative… everyone – yourself included – hated the bastard, but you can’t help but feel a draft of nostalgia and sadness. There are few non-technically inclined Internet users who have not had at least one page set up within one of the service’s many “neighbourhoods” back in the day. During those “Wild-Wild-West” days of the World Wide Web, GeoCities was the system that gave every user the chance to become a web developer, providing anyone with a functional, albeit horrendous personal or professional website.
Of course, in today’s Web 2.0 world, GeoCities has become something of an inside joke for web developers and few people would even think about actually crafting a webpage through the system, so Yahoo! – who had acquired the platform back in 1999, four years after its inception – had little choice but to shut the service down for good, a move that had been announced in early April. The closure leaves current GeoCities site owners with an upgrade option, allowing them to move their free GeoCities website to the Yahoo! Web Hosting platform. Care to speculate on the number of users who will actually take Yahoo! up on this offer? My guess would be somewhere around 50, two of which will most likely be David Bohnett and John Rezner, founders of the original BHI company, in 1995.
Although GeoCities is widely speculated to have been an unprofitable business venture for Yahoo!, it has empowered and inspired people’s self-expression online, an attitude that has shaped the way we use the Internet and has spanned many relevant aspects of today’s World Wide Web, including blogs and social networks.
So as we bid a final farewell to an old friend and look towards the future, we must never forget that we may well owe Wordpress, Facebook and Twitter to the much-criticized GeoCities.
Earlier this week, rumours started circulating the WWW, announcing the soon-to-be-released Google Music, a platform supposedly offering advanced music search capabilities, along with an in-browser streaming functionality.
The match between Internet giants Google and Yahoo / Microsoft is heating up, with the playoffs probably scheduled for the second half of 2010, which will see the launch of Google Chrome OS, a heavyweight contender for Micrososft Windows’ undisputed veteran OS championship reign. In the meantime, however, neither of these major league contenders is touring the country and signing autographs. They are all hard at work adding value to the Web 2.0 environment and to their shares of stock. But Google might take the Spartan approach, as it seems to be looking to taunt junior heavyweight star, Apple.
A couple of days ago, Wired.com divulged Google was working on a new project, intended as a music search platform and speculated on the possible names for said platform, namely Google Music, Google Audio and Google One Box. The service is likely to be unveiled next Wednesday and will feature song previews and buying options via music retailers Lala and iLike, according to the same source. Now aside from the excitement and fun, this might turn out to be a big move on Google’s part, as such a music platform is likely to target a market traditionally dominated by Apple’s iTunes application. Although the new system will most probably feature some similar functions to those of Yahoo Music – more specifically, song and artist search, news and artist information – the song preview streaming and buying options, however, are clearly a poke at the iTunes media player application.
The Google Music project seems to have been one year in the making, according to FoxNews, having been suggested to Google by the Big Four of the music industri themselves, SA Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Bros. Music Corp and EMI Group. In other words, a staggering 85% of the music industry is looking to break the iTunes monopoly on music download.
With the more or less official announcement of Google Music, the company took a rahter bold, albeit profitable step forward, teaming up with the entertainment industry’s giants to tackle a well-established monopoly. Not only will the new platform boost Google’s image and score points in the epic Search Engine Wars, but it will also fill the shareholders’ pockets, as the collected revenue from advertising will most probably be immense. With record sales plummeting to record lows and Internet music downloads rising fast, Google has seized a tremendous opportunity and has proven, once again, that it is always one step ahead of the competition in terms of understanding and capitalizing on the potential of Web 2.0.
I need not emphasize the importance of tracking the Search Engine spiders crawling record of your websites, need I? Whether you want to check the zeal and regularity of Search Engines in visiting your website, want to find out which specific pages were crawled, want to verify the obedience of crawlers towards your robots.txt file or you simply want to filter spider activity from your web metrics reports, you need to keep track of the various spiders and bots sent away to do the Search Engine’s dirty work. Provided here is a list of the IP addresses of the majority of Search Engine crawlers, for which I can’t take credit, which solely belongs to Dan Kramer of IPLists, whose efforts have made the world of Web 2.0 a better place. If you would like to do more than thank Dan for his efforts, you could buy him a drink.
So as we bid a final farewell to an old friend and look towards the future, we must never forget that we may well owe Wordpress, Facebook and Twitter to the much-criticized GeoCities.![[Ask]](https://seo-wolf.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/ask.png)
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for the second half of 2010, which will see the launch of Google Chrome OS, a heavyweight contender for Micrososft Windows’ undisputed veteran OS championship reign. In the meantime, however, neither of these major league contenders is touring the country and signing autographs. They are all hard at work adding value to the Web 2.0 environment and to their shares of stock. But Google might take the Spartan approach, as it seems to be looking to taunt junior heavyweight star, Apple.
A couple of days ago, 
