Subject areaChannels and tools
GeoCities was the best-known free web hosting service of the 1990s, where anyone could publish their own personal homepage.
It was founded in 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner, initially under the name Beverly Hills Internet. Sites were arranged in thematic «neighbourhoods», and the address combined neighbourhood, street and house number, producing long and odd addresses. Yahoo! bought it in 1999 and closed it in the United States in 2009; part of the archive was saved by the volunteers of the Archive Team.
For marketing it is an ancestor of user-generated content: millions of people learned to publish there, long before blogs and social networks.
An example
In 1997 Enrico Giubertoni and Erica Borgaro published their first personal website on GeoCities. The free space was 1 megabyte, later raised to 5, and at the time it seemed immense.
Enrico Giubertoni. Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0: you may quote, translate and adapt this entry with the author’s name and a link, stating any changes. For commercial use, write to info@enricogiubertoni.com
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