Exploring the Ruins of Lehman.com

Lehman Brothers, at the domain lehman.com, is of course the giant investment bank that was allowed to fail, tipping the global financial system into chaos and collapse. The company is now in a state of bankruptcy, but its sprawling website appears much as it was before the end came.

Check out Lehman.com's History Timeline: it carefully records every detail of Lehman's existence but only through 2007. The site's Awards and Recognition page is another eerie area. Right up to the end of its existence, the firm appears to have been such accolades as "Best Credit Derivative House." Perhaps the ghostliest area of Lehman.com is its Careers page, where an invitation to "Begin Your Journey" and "Engage Your Passion" rotates undeterred by events. Similarly, the firm's Intellectual Capital section is months out of date.

Lehman.com has become unstuck in time, and while it's perhaps disingenous to expect that a lowly HTML coder would have been retained merely to update these sections, but the lack of closure is stunning.

SiliconAlley.com is a Ghost Site

SiliconAlley.com is an intriguing Ghost Site I stumbled upon today while researching the history of New York's Silicon Alley. The title statement on its home page ("It's Been a While/Let's Reboot/Who's New/It Sure Beats Surfing the Internet") suggests that the site is an active reunion site for New York based tech workers who survived the New Economy crash of 2000-2001. And its META description tag ("SiliconAlley.Com - It's where SiliconAlley gets down to business. Everything and Everybody you need to know to do business in SiliconAlley, the largest online community in the world!") suggests that much robust activity occurs within its confines.

But when I ventured further within the site, I found areas that seem to be completely abandoned, with the most recent postings from March 2006. Other signs of cyber-decay include a dysfunctional "Newswire" link, an empty "Updates" area, and a "Forum" area whose most recent posting is from May of 2006 (I'd link to these areas directly but because the whole site is built with frames, linking is just about impossible).

New York's Silicon Alley may rise again someday, but if this site is any indication, we might have a long time to wait before Resurrection Day.

A Fresh Crop of Bit-Rotten Ghost Sites

Ghost Sites correspondent Mastaclocksetta sent us a bunch of dead and semi-dead sites, and they're an interesting potpourri of cyber-decay.

First up is "V Shape Mind," at the domain www.vshapemind.com, which appears to be the site of a musical group of the same name. Mastaclocksetta notes that "if you click on "News," you'll see that their most recent news is from 1/29/2004 at 2:56 PM." We clicked around and also noticed a defunct Tour Schedule and a busted link to "Radio Requests." We really can't say whether this band is defunct but this dysfunctional web site suggests the worst.

Next is "StealthGeeks" at the domain www.stealthgeeks.net. The site's current message is "nothing interesting to see here. Please move along," and it's an accurate statement. A search through the Internet Archive, however, yields the fact that StealthGeeks was an LA-based Internet consultancy firm specializing in UNIX/Windows System Architecture. What became of the firm behind this Ghost Site is anybody's guess.

Bob's House.Net, at www.bobshouse.net, is another oldie bearing a 2002 Copyright stamp. The site's last update appears to have occurred in early 2004. Most of the information here seems to be personal and includes at least one compelling episodic story titled "The Life and Times of a Fat Geek" and a series of opinion pieces including "Why I am an Atheist" (Christopher Hitchens has nothing on this guy).

Youp 2K, located at http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/youp/, is a New Zealand-based site that appears to have run out of steam in 2002. It appears to have served as a gallery for artwork created using Paint Shop Pro, plus a bunch of music tracks recorded in the late 1990's.

Mewtwofan's Pokemon Page, at http://www.hostultra.com/~mewtwofan/index.php?id=index2, is an interesting relic from the age of Pokemon. Between January of 2004 and May of 2005, it was frequently updated, but fell into disuse shortly afterward. A notice posted in March of 2007 notes that the site will remain defunct (and asks that people stop sending him e-mail about it). Frankly, I think this guy should reactivate this site, replace its affiliate links with Adsense code, and have a go at it again, perhaps using a bit of click arbitrage. Adsense Empires have been built with far less!

CyberSickness.Org is in a Coma

The term "Cybersickness" doesn't connote the sort of generalized nausea and ill-feeling one has from spending too much time on the Web: instead, it's a particular form of motion-sickness experienced from too much virtual gaming, and it seems to be especially acute among those wearing VR goggles (I'm not sure if people still do this).

The site CyberSickness.org was launched in 2002 to serve as a focal point for researchers studying VR-induced motion sickness, but this Ghost Site doesn't seem to have been updated since 2004, which may indicate that the problem of cybersickness has either lessened, or that the researchers may have simply given up and moved on to more pressing problems, such as the virulant form of cyber-psychosis which just about everyone on the Web suffers from today.

JawToons.com is Gone

JawToons.com, a popular, long-running site featuring Christian-themed comics, is no longer active on the Web (going to jawtoons.com yields a "site not found" message). Although JawToons.com is dead, Mr. Wall continues to actively maintain several Web sites, including an intriguing site called TVSignoffs.com, which features archival recordings of late-night television sign-off messages.

Good copies of JawToons.com in its prime are available at the Internet archive. Thanks to Tina for this tip.

Ghosts of a Disastrous Ad Campaign

After the Mars Candy Company realized that its ill-considered "After the Kiss" Superbowl commercial wasn't exactly making the world love Snickers, all traces of the campaign were stricken from the Web, including the campaign's website, which resided at the domain afterthekiss.com.

I was able to dig up some screenshots of this self-censored Web site, which wasn't up long enough to be indexed by the Internet archive. Good riddance, afterthekiss.com. Why is it that the people responsible for this kind of idiocy never seem to get fired?