If you have been around GeoCities for awhile, you may be surprised at the changes that have taken place the past few months. If you've just joined the family of personal homepage builders, you may still be surprised at the number of changes that have happened the past several months.

One of the biggest changes was the move away from the neighborhood structure first popularized by the upstart GeoPages. The story is that keeping all those neighborhoods was a drain on computer power, and that users complained that remembering addresses was difficult when it was one long neighborhood followed by a long suburb name followed by a number that, all too often, didn't mean enough to be remembered. My Vienna site is Strasse/7000. It used to be a big thing to have a site at the beginning of the thousands designation, even if it was in a suburb. These sites were visited heavily simply by virtue of the fact they were first in the list of neighborhood listings. In those days, the listings were graphically portrayed as actual homes with little crooked streets leading from one to another. Not so any more.

While the old neighborhood system is still in place, no one knows how much longer it will last. The new site designations are written according to membername, and that is not all bad. Easier to remember, etc., etc., etc. The new system categorizes pages according to subject, with each neighborhood having a set variety of subjects. Any page in any neighborhood can wind up being categorized by any subject in any other neighborhood, so there is a little more possibility for varied interests being recognized, without the necessity of building a new web page in a more suitable hood.

Using the functions available at http://geocities.yahoo.com/cgi-bin/hood/geo?hood=Vienna (now isn't *that* easy to remember?) I'll be visiting pages with different themes and looking for some of the better ones to bring to view here. If anyone knows of any good classical music pages, or pages dealing with opera, ballet, or the city of Vienna, Austria, drop me a line. The site doesn't have to be in GeoCities, by the way. We're branching out.