It may be unfair to look on Geocities so badly. After all, pre-facebook and social networks in general this was one of the only ways to easily make a website, or even to show your photographs to the world. Geocities along with many others of its ilk soon fell into disuse as “proper” hosting became available, but it is still fun to look back on the wild earlier days of the web.

See this site as it would look on Geocities

Yes, I did have a Geocities site at one point. And I did go through the entire roster of hand-coded HTML 1.0 and free advertising-supported hosting.

To see any other site in Comic Sans with dancing babies, simply append any web address to the end of the URL when you click that link above.

Note: There is a Geocities archive, lovingly saved by crawling the entire Geocities site as it was closed down. You might find more at Archive.org and the Wayback machine.

From the amazing site “Information Is Beautiful” comes this visualisation of how billions of dollars are spent around the world, in relative terms.

You can instantly see, for example, that at first glance the cost of the Iraq War seems to dwarf all others, until you look further down and see the “worst case” total cost of the world financial meltdown.

$000,000,000 costs in relative terms

(The US 9-zero for billion costs seems to have become the norm, whereas in the UK it makes more sense to me be a “thousand million” with a million million being a billion, i.e. 12 zeros. Guess the US won out on that one!)

Other interesting info-graphics from Information Is Beautiful include:

• Chances Of Dying In A Plane Crash
• Fatal Infection
• Can Drugs Make You Happy?

There are other websites on the net with some very thought provoking visualisations and info-graphics including Mark Easton’s blog at BBC News, Infosthetics, The Guardian Datablog’s Flickr Group, Wall Stats, Cool Infographics and there’s more listed in this article at Smashing Magazine.

You could even make your own using widgets from the Google Visulisation project!

3.14 = Pie

Is it sad that I find this cool?