Geocities and TAO

On October 26 Yahoo will shut down their free webhosting service Geocities, which back at the beginning of the WWW was one of most popular sites. Though most of the sites hosted there won't be missed, and have been moved to other pages like facebook. So why should I care? Several of the Tambon administrative organizations (TAO), not having the funds for a real web presence with a well-designed webpage, have instead created pages on Geocities, which though often badly designed or partially broken still were a source of information about these entities. I hope I have found all the relevant already and extracted at least the Muban lists from them.

As an example I chose the TAO Wang Sai in Khlong Khlung district, Kamphaeng Phet province. Their Geocities websize ubtwangsai only contains the photos and names of all the officials and employees in the TAO, and while it has some more links these have no target page yet. Also, the counter in bottom shows a mere 540 visits since it was started in October 2006. However, unlike other TAO, Wang Sai actually moved to a separate webpage already and only forgot to close down their geocities page - but their new one at wangsai.org is still a broken one, for example most of the links in the menu point to a local file and probably indicate that these pages in fact haven't been written yet.

And since Geocities isn't profitable enough to be continued, I have my doubts other similar services would continue long as well. One which is also fairly popular with Thai entities is tripod.