They were once the Web's shining stars: Kozmo.com, Pandesic.com, PlanetRx.com.
In the era of the digital plague, they have vanished seemingly without a trace -- unless, that is, you go to the Museum of E-Failure.
With digital snapshots of dearly departed home pages serving as headstones, the one-man operation is building a sort of virtual cemetery memorializing the Web's deceased at www.disobey.com/ghostsites. In recent months, the job has gone from an occasional hobby to nearly a full-time obsession, the site's creator said.
"It's kind of a remembrance of things past," said the creator, Steve Baldwin, 44, a free-lance writer based in Yonkers, New York, who began collecting dead pages nearly six years ago while working for the once-promising but ill-fated Time Warner megasite, Pathfinder.
It is also a mission that requires quick reflexes. If there is buzz online that "so-and-so is laying off 80 percent of its staff and is down to six people," Baldwin said, "I think, `Better grab a screen shot before they close up.'"
He has missed golden opportunities for some sites, like MyLackey.com, once a high-flying gofer site based in Seattle.
If he misses a site, Baldwin has a couple of fallbacks. He will troll Web search sites for copies of the late home page. And former employees will occasionally send him pages they kept on their hard disks as mementoes.
Baldwin has also developed a handful of tricks for predicting dot-downfalls. He does sophisticated searches on page updates and looks for phrases like "We are no longer taking orders" or "We regret to inform."
Sometimes Baldwin is accused of jumping the gun, as with listings of APBnews.com, a crime-information site based in New York City, and NBCi.com, the Internet arm of the NBC television network. He defends himself by saying the links are "endangered" if not exactly extinct. "I put them in my protective zoo" for safekeeping, he said. Baldwin got the idea for the museum while noticing pages going dark on Pathfinder and other portals during the Internet's first big content shakeout, near the end of 1996.
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