Jim Regan -- Site Reviews
'arrrghhh! pirated sites' and 'Ghost Sites: The Museum of E-Failure'
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While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, "flattery" is too often used as an excuse for plagiarism. You may not know this, but website design is very easy to copy (you only need to download the source code, exchange your own text and images for the original, and post the result onto the server of your choice. And while it's not that surprising that this is done, it can be a bit galling to see just how bald-faced some copies are.
Enter arrgh! pirated sites!. Webmaster Tim Murtaugh has made it his mission to expose some of the most glaring examples of this "flattery," and the result should be a required visit for any budding web designer – if only to illustrate the likelihood of plagiarists getting caught.
Pirated Sites itself refrains from any cutting-edge design elements,(they'd probably just be stolen anyway) and opens with a recent e-mail Murtaugh received from someone ... less than pleased with his crusade. A few links to information on copyright are included, (any original creative work, even source code, is protected by copyright) followed by the Site of the Moment and a few other recent discoveries. (The pair featured in Site of the Moment as this review was being written, "Point B" and "Fueled By Ramen", provide an exceptional example of web twins 'separated at birth' – sharing not only the same source code, but copy, scripting, and navigational images as well.)
The tour proper, though, is in the Archive. Here are two dozen side-by-side comparisons of, in the webmaster's terms, "original"s and "copy?"s. (The question mark is only fair – after all, this could all be a simple case of the collective unconscious being much more vivid than anyone imagined ... right?) While an out and out charge of plagiarism could be tricky to prove in some cases, (such as technotel v. casema) others (brucepowell.com v. wpeck.com) are absolutely staggering in the level of their audacity.
In each case, links to the contesting sites are provided, as well as screen captures of the pages that earned the sites their place in the collection. The screen captures are necessary in many cases, as attention caused by Murtaugh's work has caused at least some of the offenders to change their designs. (Which, in the end, is probably the most impressive attribute of Pirated Sites.)
The second selection represents a web crusade of another kind. Steve Baldwin was determined to preserve a record of some of the hundreds of sites that have shuffled off this digital coil and passed over to e-heaven, and Ghost Sites: The Museum of E-Failure was created to serve this noble purpose. The site has been live (and at least once, near death) since 1996, and currently offers a collection of more than 350 screenshots – chronicling the last words of extinct and fossilized websites.
Some examples (eToys.com, Boo.com) will probably ring a bell. Others(dayliliauction.com) may have been more obscure, but can still be interesting in the stories of their downfall. (Dayliliauction's farewell page includes a message from a service provider, to the effect that they had unilaterally terminated a program vital to the site's online auctions, but "... it was our pleasure to serve you ...")
Some used humor to say goodbye, as with dailyradar.com's Top Ten reasons why it had suspended publication, (a Top Ten list with 12 reasons) while others (signalinvestigations.com) got straight to the point. (In at least one case, reports of death seem to have been, at least temporarily, exaggerated – even though there's been a good deal of press about the demise of NBCi.com, the site still had fresh postings on the day this piece was written, May 21.)
But while the listings on Ghost Sites' home page offer the equivalent of deathbed photographs, the archives introduce another possibility – that of poking around a virtual ghost town. At the bottom of the home page's left-hand column are links to previous issues of Ghost Sites, the Web versions of which – previous to 2001 – actually include a short summary of each ghost site's history, and a direct link to the deceased.
(Houdini should have been so lucky.) Visitors are invited to explore such relics as The Paintsville Herald's Y2K Survival Guide, and the online presence of Omni Magazine, (which ceased publication in 1998) and while some sites exhibit various stages of decay, others are completely – almost unnaturally – preserved.
Of course, complete, albeit dormant sites may still exist for the more recent 'screenshot-only' entries as well. You'll just have to type in the URL yourself, and see what you find.
Pirated Sites is available at http://www.pirated-sites.com, with Ghost Sites at http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/.