A digital Pompei

The Deleted City from deletedcity on Vimeo.

Regular readers know how I feel about preserving our rapidly disappearing history. So I was thrilled to learn about efforts to save the Geocities from the trash heap.

A fascinating effort from the Internet Archive called The Deleted City is dedicated to bringing back to life -- at least in read-only form -- Geocities.com, a once-thriving digital ecosystem of amateur community that Yahoo bought for $4 billion in the late '90s, then shuttered two years ago.

I never blamed Yahoo for pulling the plug on something that clearly was not making them money or pulling in traffic, but digital historians and the millions who created a Geocities page shuddered at the thought of so much ground-breaking digital history disappearing ... just like that.

The Deleted City is the safety valve, a data visualization of 641 gigabytes of Geocities data that "depicts the file system as a city map, spatially arranging the different neighbourhoods and individual lots based on the number of files they contain." To think that so much data was not only saved but in a highly visual format is amazing.

It goes to show you what can be done when smart people put their heads together. And it's reassuring to know the folks at Internet Archive have a big project under their belt. Who knows when another once-dominant community -- say MySpace -- shows up on life support.