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As some of you may have noticed.  Yahoo! officially announced yesterday that they are no longer allowing no accounts for GeoCities the free online hosting and site building service.

This folks marks the end of an era, one of the last relics of a all but forgotten time of the 1990’s .com boom.  I remember back in the day when the web was riddled with thousands of ransom note pages on GeoCities, AOL Member pages and so-on.  Virtually every ISP and host out there offered member page hosting.  Which usually amounted to a URL of http://www.aol.com/memberpages/~jason and you had about 10 to 20 MBs of space to do and say whatever you wanted.  Oh the sense of empowerment, I remember using tools such as RoboHTML,HoTMetaL and FrontPage to create my very first web site.  But that was nearly a decade and a half ago, my how times change.

Those free sites and freeware tools have been replaced with things like WordPress, Joomla and Blog Spot.  This “new” generation of free web, is just the latest incarnation in what will surely be an endless of series of web site iterations as technologies evolve and people’s demand for free content and online distribution grows and changes.

It’s a nostalgic end to a bygone era, while I haven’t had a GeoCities site since about circa 1996, a bit of me is sad, its like watching Vinyl go by way side to CD and DVD to blu-ray.  You always remember that first time and what it meant, you never have that first time again.

I live and breathe the web, its what I do, and I enjoy it dearly.  Now I sit here today nearly 20 years after the first time I made my first outside world data connection supporting my own CMS platform, developing web sites for numerous companies and monitoring my servers in Texas, and while the technology has changed, the analysis is far greater and everything has become so commercialized one thing remains the same.   People love technology, they love to communicate and I love to create and watch my creations get used and improved.  Which is why I simply couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else at this point.

Good Bye GeoCities, you inspired us all, launched the careers of many and gave way to a new generation of free information sharing and greased the doors of flood gates that are Blogs, E-Zines and online articles.

Happy Webbing Folks.