[xbryanx]

It's scary to think about how ephemeral some of these early internet experiments are. Wayback Machine is great for static sites, but I'm amazed that enough of this interactive media/software was captured to even report on. I hope that the Bowie camp has some smart archivists who will preserve this unique material.

[cpwright]

I worked on BowieNet in around 2000. He was really very involved in the site and content. The biggest draw was the members-only concert.

Regarding the content. There was another company that did the design work, a bunch of it in flash; but also in HTML for the message boards and stuff that we integrated into our PHP forum that had all the actual messages stored in MySQL. I'm not sure what would have happened to any of that when VillageWorld (the company that did the backend at least initially) went bust in 2004; or if it was migrated away or shut down before that.

The live chats were either IRC with a Java web client or we also had an NPH script that we could of used, but I don't remember which ended up being "real" at this point. There were definitely some that were organized and others that were not.

[drzaiusapelord]

Live chats with Bowie?

Care to give more details, stories, etc? BowieNet sounds fascinating to me.

[nothis]

Right? It's interesting to see data "rust", if you will, over time just like a physical thing. How looking at stuff in the Wayback Machine, some decorative images might not load, some link might lead nowhere and in a way, it's no different from a book's pages falling apart.

There's so much data today, everything is stored and categorized, but I still believe that, say, 20 years from now, a lot will be lost nevertheless. No matter how easy it is to store stuff today.

[frandroid]

Really, not only the data needs to be stored, but virtual machines needed to see the content need to be stored as well.