Note 55: the courage of the geogorod takes

Rubric: Our networks

The courage of the geogorod takes

Anton Nosik

When I had a chance to write for the first time about the Geocities server on the Vesti pages in December last year, this place was relatively deserted, and few people on the network guessed about a fantastic event that was going there. Today, the word geocities has become a household vocabulary in the network vocabulary, and with its help all large Internet freebines are designated. We will start, however, not with nostalgia for a less crowded network, but with a definition.

Geocities (http://www.geocities.com/), nee Geeopages - this is a large American advertising -Internet company that announced more than a year ago that it is ready to provide anyone to the place for free of charge on its www server to create her own home pages. Since rumors on the Internet are spreading quickly, the first 5 thousand guests came to use the company's bounties in the first couple of months. However, then the matter did not develop vigorously: even the most active builders of sites on Geocities deep down were convinced that sooner or later this freebie would end, and they would be a broken trough with their pages that were untimely disappeared from the face. The fears were aggravated by the fact that the Geocities server worked quite slowly, giving food to talk that the invitation to everyone was made with warm hosts without thinking, without a serious technical analysis of the capacities that would be required for this. For the same reason, the Haver Mevi Haver principle, popular in Israel, did not work too well: not every regret of the network took responsibility to advise his friends a server, the future of which is so vague and fortunate.

Nevertheless, the news of Geocities was gradually spreading through the Internet. Moreover, among the first inhabitants of the virtual "cities" were the creators of very popular pages on a very different topic - from the personal life of movie stars to the subtleties of programming in the membranes of the Unix system. Gradually, the flow of those who want to open their corner on Geocities began to resemble the line in the mausoleum. Finding a free place to create your page in any of the "cities" has become difficult. The skeptics again started talking about the fact that the system would be overflowing soon.

It turned out, however, on the contrary, the system gained strength and commercial weight due to its new guests. Today, Geocities have 24 thematic areas (including Siliconvalley, Capitolhill, Paris, Athens, Soho, Sunsetstrip, Thetropics, Hollywood, etc.), and the "population" of individuals is already approaching ten thousand. This holiday is financed by the money of advertising, which is readily placed on the server by American firms that consider it for the honor (and self -interest) to become sponsors of such a popular and crowded global party.

Among our readers connected to the Internet, at least a hundred people at different times took advantage of the hospitality of the American server to create their own pages on Geocities. The author of these lines was also noted there - more out of curiosity and a born tendency to experiments than for the lack of its own WWW space. The first home page of Demyan Kudryavtsev, subsequently - the classic of the Russian Web'a - is still available to a review at http://www.geocities.com/athens/2756/. Of these developments, the fashion magazine "Eye/Ay!" (http://www.beseder.com/eye/), marked with a whole heap of international prizes and laudatory reviews. Here, on Geocities, to this day, the “home page of Russian feminism” is operating - the creation of the lovely Australian Elena Leonova. The creator of the home page of Igal Amir, the unforgettable Marina Ron-Levy, also threw an anchor in the virtual waters of the warm server. Here, in the Silicon Valley, the MIRC customer for windows 3.11 debuted, and all the resources of this constantly growing server, of course, can’t be listed, although it is obvious that the ratio between the noise and the useful signal in the Geocities population is far from in favor of the latter.

To date, all Geocities users are free and freely provided with the following joys of life:

* Megabyte of the disk space on the www-server, with the expansion option, would be why;

* Interface for automated generation of home pages - for users unfamiliar with decoding HTML reduction, but who want to have their own www space

* Access to the FTP server, with which you can load to your site not only graphic and text files, but even CGI scripts and programs on Perlet (by agreement with the server administration)

* Automatically launched at the opening of the site a graphic meter of visitors

* Own mailbox Pop3 with an address in structure: user@geocites.com. We are not talking about the next "Mivce" with Aliasing of already existing mailboxes, but about the very full package of POP3 and SMTP services, without the declared restriction of discos.

* Conferences and postal sheets for inhabitants of various virtual areas

* Interactive forums with the participation of all kinds of celebrities

* Automated entry of the page in all "robots", indexing the network (since they all look at the lists of GEOCITIS pages at least once a week).

In short, today Geocities are the perfect solution to all problems for a private user who wants to get his home page. To fulfill all the formalities necessary to open your site there, it is enough to go to the main page - http://www.geocities.com/ - choose a address and fill out the questionnaire.

Unfortunately, for many entrepreneurs and fortunately for the author of these lines, the GEOCITIS gift is unsuitable for creating commercial pages. Partly - because such an opportunity is prohibited by the charter of a free server. It’s also because it is simply not necessary to give a digital address on Geocities as its home page: this means that the company did not find $ 10 a month to pay for the commercial hosting of its site. Finally, the statistics of site visitors cannot be obtained on Geocities, and for the owner of the commercial page this is always very important. Therefore, and practical experience confirms our assessment - the threat of "commercialization from below" the largest free Internet server does not threaten. Like us, boars of commercial web, the lure of commercial customers in the virtual expanses of Geocities does not threaten.

The next issue will follow the next conversation about the Internet freebie, the return to the current topics and the review of the battle of the titans between the third rizes of Netskayip and the Explorer.