Recently, Debbie and I took the kids on the "old house" tour of the Main Line, to show the boys where we grew up. First stop on the tour was my old house on Summit Grove Avenue in Bryn Mawr.

It wasn't there.

There was just a parking lot where my old house had been. Which was worse, in a way, than if someone had torn it down to build a new house. Or an office. Or, well, anything.

So I can understand how many must be feeling on hearing the news that GeoCities is shutting down, after all these years. (Since 1995!). Like so many websites, Ishbadiddle got its start on GeoCities -- you can still check out the old site while you get the chance.

I used to say that blogging was what really democratized the web. First there was desktop publishing, which was going to make it possible for anyone to create professional-looking media. But there was no distribution for citizen media, and unless your zine was in Factsheet 5 no one other than your friends would ever read it. The web was supposed to solve the distribution problem, but changing a site was even harder than desktop publishing -- meaning that most people just had a never-updated GeoCities page with pictures of their cats. Blogging changed that.

I suppose with the new social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) we're back to the distribution question -- how do you get people to read what you say?

So good-bye, GeoCities, and thanks for giving Ishbadiddle its start. Sorry you're going to become a parking lot. Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?

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