ONE OF the eerie things about the World Wide Web is how some sites become frozen in time when an untimely event befalls their creators. Many of these ghost sites belong to failed companies whose clocks stopped when the money ran out, but whose websites were not auctioned off with the office furniture.
They are often like an electronic Pompeii, preserved exactly as they were at the moment when the final redundancy notices were handed out. Some come complete with phone numbers where you can leave messages that are never returned, or they invite visitors to apply for long-vanished positions with the company.
Others metamorphose into different sites when disaster strikes—like pets.com morphing into petsmart.com when it was taken over by new owners. Sometimes the metamorphosis can be quite puzzling. Look for the site of the defunct American retail chain Jordan Marsh () and you will find maps for gatherings of owners of the Honda S2000 automobile. Why, we’ll probably never know.
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Many sites simply vanish, like tenants slipping away when the rent comes due. But there are sites that are dedicated to preserving their memory. At you can find snapshots of defunct sites ranging from “barney the antichrist” to dead dotcom companies such as automatic-media.com.
Upside magazine also has an archive of dotcom disasters at . This ends mysteriously at 31 August 2001—about the time of a near-death experience (otherwise known as a cash crisis) that almost transformed Upside into Belly-Upside.
A few sites attempt to continue trading after death. At you are redirected to a page listing all the assets of the defunct firm that are for sale.
A handful are positively spooky. Until recently, the former home page of Geyser Networks at was nothing but a flat black page. If you scrolled to the very bottom, you came to a tiny link giving you the opportunity to skip an introduction and proceed to the rest of the site. But when you clicked on it, it led nowhere.
Now, even the black page and the link have gone. RIP, Geyser Networks.
IF YOU’VE ever wondered how Google manages to search the Web with such speed, it seems the answer is … pigeons. A link recently put up by Google on its opening page takes you to a full explanation of “the technology behind Google’s great results”.
“The heart of Google’s search technology,” we are told, “is PigeonRankTM, a system for ranking web pages developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University … PigeonRank’s success relies primarily on the superior trainability of the domestic pigeon (Columba livia) and its unique capacity to recognise objects regardless of spatial orientation. The common grey pigeon can easily distinguish among items displaying only the minutest differences, an ability that enables it to select relevant websites from among thousands of similar pages.”
The page comes complete with pictures of rows of pigeons staring at computer screens, and some people might even be convinced by it—except for the fact that the link went up on 1 April. Go to for the full story.
WE LIVE in a throwaway society. Mass-produced electronics is now so cheap it costs far more to repair than replace. Gone are the days when enthusiasts with soldering irons could save money by building or rebuilding their own equipment.
But some enthusiasts still build things themselves and a recent edition of Everyday Practical Electronics describes an intriguing little gadget, which costs only a few pounds, made from a few resistors, capacitors and diodes. Like all the best gadgets it is very clever and completely pointless.
The Forever Flasher is a little box that connects to your TV aerial. After a few seconds, a red diode starts to flash several times a second. This then continues for as long as the box stays fixed. The designer reckons the circuit is being powered by a mix of TV signals and interference from all the electrical equipment in the neighbourhood.
Feedback finds something irresistible about the idea of getting light absolutely free, however dim. Perhaps if an enthusiast were to make a few hundred Forever Flashers, they might generate as much light as a candle.
YOU may like to join us in pondering how to answer the question recently put by a reader of the Daily Mail to the newspaper’s resident medium, Betty Shine. It was: “I would like to meditate but have a fear of leaving my body and not being able to return. Can you help me to overcome this fear?”
Shine’s answer—that meditation is “quite safe and relaxing” and that if you pretend you’re a tree you will become “grounded”—seemed inadequate to us, but we admit we haven’t the faintest idea what answer we would have given.
OWNERS of Hyundai mobile phones can download and print the manual off the Web from . That’s what Michael Thompson did, only to find to his puzzlement that the first page of the manual is entirely taken up with the message “Do not print this page” in very large letters.
What, Thompson wonders, is the point?
FINALLY, reader Gary Alexander’s copy of Microsoft Word marks the term “world-wide” as a grammatical error and suggests it be changed to “worldwide”. The changed word is immediately marked as a spelling mistake, with a recommended change to “world-wide”. Of course, accepting that change leads to an immediate grammatical error mark… and so on, forever and ever till the end of time.
