Who needs a unifying theme anyway?

Sure, the site was ugly, and, of course, Yahoo paid too much for it (though it must be said that those were Internet-boom billions paid out in inflated stock, not real money). But GeoCities deserves much more credit than we give it, because it was the first big venture built on what is now hailed as the defining feature of the Web 2.0 boom—”user-generated content.