Mindjack.com, Influential Cyber-Culture Blog, Has Not Been Updated Since November, 2006

Mindjack.com, a venerable New York-based cyber-culture ezine that went live in 1999, has been lying in a state of suspended animation for fourteen months, leading observers to believe that it has posted its last story. Founded by Donald Melanson, a self-described "media junkie and technological inquisitor," Mindjack.com faithfully chronicled the rise of cyber-culture with the aid of a stable of high-profile contributing writers, including Justin Hall and Cory Doctorow.

As recently as November, 2007, the site contained a notice that the site was "retooling and should be ready to go in a few weeks" but no signs of life have emerged from the servers of Mindjack.com since that time. The site might still rise from its current coma; but because this seems unlikely, we award it our "Dead But Well Preserved" award.

Three Ghosties (Site is Dead, But Well-Preserved)

The Search Engine Marketing Weblog Dies, But Will Remain Active to Collect Link Juice

We're written in the past about Jason Calacanis (who we like) and the fact that his meteoric career has left an unprecedently large trail of dead Web flotsam in his wake (which we don't like). First there was SiliconAlleyReporter.com, then VentureReporter.com, then WeblogInc.com, Netscape.com, and lately Mahalo.com. Some might call this aggressive serial entrepreneurship; others might use the far simpler analogy of the proverbial bull in the china shop to explain Jason's record.

Which brings us to The Search Engine Marketing Weblog, a foundational Blog for Jason's WeblogInc.com empire which he shrewdly sold to AOL for more than $20 million. Like a sizeable percentage of Blogs which formerly operated under the WeblogInc.com umbrella, this one has been languishing for some time, and finally gave up the ghost in early August of 2007. The Search Engine Marketing Weblog was of course devoted to covering SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization), two topics which have spawned a phalanx of similar projects.

The Blog author's farewell message contains the interesting tidbit that the site, while defunct, will not be decommissioned, presumably to preserve the "link juice" it earned in its heyday (The Search Engine Marketing Weblog ranks very well for the term "Search Engine Marketing" in the organic section of Google's SERP). Unfortunately, this news-oriented site grows more irrelevant with each day that passes, and so it will inevitably drift downward towards invisibility, ceding ground to better-maintained Blogs, once Google's spiders determine that it is an antique.

Three Ghosties (Site is Dead, But Well-Preserved) I used to issue a lot of these rewards. Basically, the site's lights are still on, but nobody is home. Sometimes these sites come back, but I'd say more than half either vanished within a short time or began to suffer from serious bit rot, which can get very unpleasant.