Almost 15 years after it started, and 10 years after it was bought by Yahoo for a mere £2.17bn, Geocities is to close today. For many it’s passing will go unmarked and unnoticed. Although not by Randall Munroe, who today has made XKCD.com a homage to the glorious miasma of the eye-bending backgrounds, flashing text, scrolling text, broken links, animated gifs and badges that were so distinctive of Geocity pages. There’s even a hit counter and it proudly proclaims to be part of an internet comic web ring, the only thing that is missing is some unstoppable and tinny midi file playing on a constant loop.

It’s hard to imagine any site these days looking like the majority of the old geocity pages, well perhaps for the majority of MySpace, but as one of the first places that enabled internet users to free hosting and an easy(ish) way to make their own home on the net, something that we now take for granted. Fortunately the fabulousness of these historic sites is being saved, or of it at least by the Archive Team and there is also an automatic transfer of websites to uCoz.

Before we’re too harsh on the lovingly handcrafted homepages, the professional sites of the time weren’t much better, go check out the BBC online’s original article about the Yahoo-Geocity acquisition.

The Interwebz, and more specifically the world wide web, have both been around for quite some time now. Blogging has entered the difficult tweenager stage and even Twitter is getting past the terrible two’s tantrum throwing stage. There’s also now officially a ratio of one-to-one for every social media guru/maven/expert/sith lord to every non-social meda n00b. Pretty much all we seem to do is talk about blogging/micro-blogging/citizen journalist, how to do it well, it’s importance and impact. The horror stories of what happens when you cock up can circulate for years (seriously if I attend one more social media seminar that references either Dell Hell or the Kryptonite, I may well go postal), so it’s stunning that some companies don’t seem to realise that people use the web to talk about them and that anything they may do in a slight untoward manner may well get picked up on. It’s also surprising that marketeers still don’t seem to understand human nature and that it’s not just bloggers who don’t check their facts.

A colleague flagged an interesting tale of woe from the Inquirer about a blog competition ran by Asus that had attracted complaints due to a late in the day change to how the winner would be picked, the intro calmly stated that:

IRATE BLOGGERS are up in arms at Asus after a blogging competition at electricpig.com turned sour.

Which seemed like an excellent opportunity for me to wax lyrical about how companies need to be wary of trying to play things their own way and shouldn’t expect to get away without at least a minor blogstorm. Indeed, the whole point of the post was initially intended to be something along the lines of ‘For god’s sake people, when will you realise that the web is nothing that a huge rumour mill and stop adding grist by underestimating this. This now forms lesson one for this post, because as I researched into the story it became apparent that Asus had little option but to change the selection process.

From what I can gather, as I can’t find the original competition post, readers of Electricpig were invited to pitch to become an Asus reviewer for a month, they could pick which product they wanted and had to produce three articles per week for the duration of the competition. Six bloggers would be chosen and the winner would be decided on by a reader vote for the best one, they would then be able to keep the product they reviewed. One lucky commentator would also be given an Eee PC, so far so funky. Posts were written, the competition closed and the votes piled in, and the winner by a fair stretch was Gavyn Britton, except there was then some discussion as to whether he had gamed the system by asking for votes on other forums. Second lesson, people will always try to game the system and sometimes being overly-cynical is actually a good thing.

It was decided to then ask the six bloggers involved to vote for their favourite reviewer, which meant Emma Hill, who’d only gained 1% of the popular vote, won. Unfortunately, the post about her winning rather glossed over the reason why the selection process had changed:

The final twist to the campaign came when we asked the six bloggers to turn on each other who they felt gave the best blogging experience. We’re happy to announce that Emma Hill, who affectionately called the ASUS Eee Top 1602 ‘ET’ and even took some cracking photos of ET in action to prove the point!

Which then meant that the Electricpig readers felt cheated and disenfranchised, leading them to complain to The Inquirer, herein lies the third lesson. The web is about transparency, it’s difficult for people to create conspiracy theories if there is nothing left for them to doubt and question, so if you are doing stuff online as a brand be open about, explain why things are the way they are and be open to discussion as to your reasons. In this case, if the final post announcing the winner had been clearer about why the selection process had changed. Another possibility would have been to ask the readers themselves how they felt the situation should be resolved. Perhaps then people wouldn’t have complained to the Inq, which in turn would not have written a misleading article blaming Asus for arbitrarily changing the rules, which in turn leads to the forth and final lesson for this post, don’t take anything you read at face value.