.................................
To leave Commie, hyper to
http://commie.oy.com/commie_leaving.html
.................................
http://www.salon.com/tech/inbox/index.html/index.html
Alas, IUMA -- the dot-com downturn claims another victim
The news that one of the Web's first music sites, the Internet
Underground Music Archive, may soon be closing down is a harsh
and unwanted reminder that the dot-com downturn is killing off
more than just a bunch of bad dot-com businesses. It's also
killing off the indie projects that made the Net cool in the
first place.
Sites like IUMA or Blogger always existed more for love than
money. But they now face the same kind of cruel reality that
every also-ran e-commerce Web site is confronting. And while
it might be comforting to believe that the Web wipe-out will
confine itself just to annihilating those pathetic dot-coms
that never had a real reason to exist, the sad truth is the
downturn is also victimizing the really neat sites that just
got too popular and too big to function without commercial
support.
IUMA symbolized many of the Net's earliest dreams -- the idea
that the middleman between artists and fans could be cut out
of the equation and the hope that small, independent bands
could thrive without becoming megastars. Each time an IUMA
bites the dust, another dream dies. --Katharine Mieszkowski
[3:30 p.m. PST, Feb. 8, 2001]
