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In the old West, when economic booms petered out, they left behind ghost towns with rusty door hinges creaking in the wind and tumbleweed blowing through deserted streets -- or so a Hollywood cliché depicts it, anyway.

On the Web, relics of the dot-com boom-turned-bust are derelict "ghost sites," virtual ghost towns along the information highway.

Enter Steve Baldwin, curator of The Museum of E-Failure -- an attempt to actively preserve the home pages of sites that will probably disappear in the next few months. Baldwin has been collecting and preserving screenshots of foundering websites since 1996 snapshots in time documenting the fall of the dot-coms that he calls "digital death-masks."

"Our goal is not to laugh at the fallen," says Steve, "but to preserve their last image, before all traces of these sites' existence are deleted from history's view.It is my hope that these screenshots may serve as a reminder of the glory, folly, and historically unique design sensibilities of the Web's Great Gilded Age. May no historical revisionists ever claim that this wacky period didn't happen - these screenshots prove that it did!"

The Museum's Screenshot Collection now numbers 350 screens.

If you'd like to support this exercise in ALT-PRINT-SCREEN documentation, you can buy a museum of e-failure mousepad for $15.

If you have a favorite rotting site that you'd like to mention, email Steve at Steve_Baldwin@hotmail.com.

You can visit the The Museum of E-Failure at:

http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/

Charles W. Moore

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