Back before everyone had a “blog,” they had “home pages,” and GeoCities was the place to have your own little soap box. My on-line life started with GeoCities, so it is kind of sad to learn that Yahoo is shutting down the service after more than a decade. GeoCities was awesome at the time, but it wasn’t without its problems. Nonetheless, I owe GeoCities a lot.

We’re in a time of short URLs. With the Twitters and Facebooks and everything else, the links we share with people need to short. Services like TinyURL and TwitterHat turn a long web address into something text message friendly, but do short links make your actual domain and address meaningless?