CityStories.Com Tells Its Last Story

CityStories.com, at the domain http://citystories.com, was an exercise in what its creator called "city-based storytelling;" its tagline was "there are a million stories in the naked city, and a million cities." Its main page consisted of a Bloglike list of links to stories on an informal network of participating sites.

Unfortunately, this site now suffers from one of the worst cases of bitrot I've seen in a long time. The most recently updated story is from April of 2005, many story links on its home page are broken, and the links to other "city story" sites in its left nav bar yield broken links, squatter sites, and even a few porn sites.

It's too bad because a site like this, if rebuilt and revamped with Adsense could might have a future. Paying people for the content they write is a generally good way to encourage continued participation, even if it's only a few dollars a day. Fifty bucks a week can make the difference between starvation and survival for some urban story-tellers.