the corner office

The CD ripping continues; I hit the K's this weekend. Ronwen has a couple of Kula Shaker CDs. I remember they were kinda famous in South Africa for about 2 weeks in the mid-90s. I've given the CDs a listen before and I quite enjoy them - big fat slabs of Gibson-laden (late update: except that Crispian Mills played a Strat, pfeh) Brit-rock with a lot of cool 60s psychedelic references and fairly decent melodies. The Eastern spirituality stuff gets a bit too shee-wow for my agnostic tastes at times, but still worth listening to.

Depressing, though, is doing a Google search for the band. Yes, you hit the official site, but it's been neglected for about 5 years. Dead links, a 404-ing forum. Clicking around a few of the top-scoring fan sites, is even more depressing, because they're pretty much the same, and most of them still sporting all the hot new web design trends circa 1997.

Ragging the sites isn't my intent though - everybody's sites looked that lousy in the 90s - the sad thing is that these sites were once lively, labours of love... and they just ended up being... forgotten. That always gets me. No "it's been real, but this is now Officially An Archive," no "the proprietor of this website got married/had kids/forgot the password/died in a freak boating accident" messages to mark the end of the owner's relationship with the site. Just frozen-in-time snapshots where the links and webring images and counters and widgets slowly decay and break. A bit like a town where everybody was given 5 minutes to pack up and move out, never to return. Eerie, no finality, and "why did they leave" and "what was this place once like, when it was alive?" questions hanging thick in the air.

For every dynamic, up-to-date corner of the web that we regularly frequent, there must be a dozen of these ghost towns... years old, long forgotten by everyone but the search engines and the occasional passer-by. In the real world we bulldoze our history and relics and sling up new office parks and drive-thru takeaway joints on top of them. On the web, our history sits forever on free site hosters, on tripods and geocities and angelfires, and lingers for years on ISP servers, each relic a few kilobytes in a long-unsubbed user directory amidst tens of thousands of other user directories, where sysadmins almost never bother to root them out and rm -rf them.

The popular web is pushing a decade old, and if it's like that now, what will it be like in another decade's time, I wonder? How many of these old Kula Shaker sites will still be serving up a page or two to bored web surfers in the year 2015?