techno-culture

My original techno-culture website is about a decade old now and lives on, mothballed on my user space on www.indigo.ie (a blast from the past URL, that). I don’t even know how to log in there anymore! The last updates were done in early 2002. I didn’t have my own domain back then, hence the cheesy Indigo one, but I wanted to call the website techno-culture to reflect my own interests — the point where technology and culture meet (this well before the techno music movement emerged; I still get lots of hits from people googling for techno music).

I first tried to get the technoculture.com URL (without the hyphen) back around 1996 but even then, it was already taken. It was interesting to follow is fortunes over the years — every now and then check in and see who owned it and what was on the site. It went to someone in Japan at one point, then to someone else after that, and has been for sale for a silly amount for the last couple of years, for more than I’d bother with. It’s a shame really — no one has ever done anything interesting with the domain name. I was happy enough with getting techno-culture.com, which suited the site better anyway as from the start, I always have had a dash or other divider between ‘techno’ and ‘culture’.

Anyway. Looking at my old site, I was curious how many of those links would still be live six years after the last update (when I would have checked all the links). A surprisingly large number, actually! The site was (is?) a personal collection of links on technology, on one hand, and then arts and culture’s intersection with technology, on the other. I’d have thought the majority of links would have passed into oblivion — but it looks like lots of people interested in these areas either also like to mothball their old sites, like me, or the sites have remained active (a considerable number of arts and technology journals are still plugging away), or (like techno-culture) morphed into something new. Blogs weren’t even invented (properly) ye at the point when I was first putting together the site. How fast things change.