This will be of interest mostly to people who used to work with me at Rare Medium: the company, surprisingly, still lives, and not just in the perfunctory, diminished, managerial-only form in which it’s been limping along for the past two years. The old Atlanta office is actually still in the business of Web development and technology consulting, having bought all of that location’s assets from the parent company (at least, that’s what I understand happened) and adopted the URL RareMedium.net.

Zoinks

When my partner at Behavior showed this to me earlier today, I had a spooky feeling, as if something had been resurrected. It’s truly eerie to poke around this Web site; though the look and feel is entirely new, almost everything else is a pitch-perfect echo of the company’s state during the dotcom boom, from the marketing message, to the terminology used in the methodology… even down to the diagram that I illustrated to explain that very same methodology.

During my career at Rare, I visited the Atlanta office once and spoke to them many times, and I remembering hearing that the office’s general manager, unlike many others at the company, was not an executive carpetbagger, and that he truly enjoyed the work and the industry of Web development. If he’s behind this continuation of the brand, then it seems there was some truth to that. Anyway, I wish them luck.

Down and Out, with Caveats

In the meantime, I get a kick out of our former URL, RareMedium.com, which emptily promises that it’s under construction. Though it features zero content, a legal disclaimer warns that “Some of the information on this website may contain projections or other forward-looking statements regarding events or the financial performance of the Company.” It goes to show that sometimes ghost can have life, and sometimes they’re just spent spirits.