Everyone else on the Internet is talking about the death of Geocities so I might as well chip in. I've been a fan of Geocities because it provided free, reputable web hosting. My first personal website was hosted there, and in high school, when our little hacking group wanted a web presence, we opened a Geocities site.

The real shame in losing Geocities is all the information which is going to disappear off of the internet. In all honesty, closing a website like Geocities is like burning the Library of Alexandria. There is a wealth of information which will be lost forever in that website. It is basically the best example of the online culture that existed from 1995 to around 2002, before the advent of blogs and social networking. A chapter of Internet history will disappear tonight.

Luckily all will not be lost. Many pages on Geocities have been archived on the Internet Archive, a project designed exactly for these situations. The only problems are you can't search within the archive, and the archive doesn't store images. The text will still be there though, and hopefully people's stories and this history will not be lost forever.