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Interview with Brewster Kahle
Netmonger writes "A
fascinating interview with the man behind The Wayback Machine. Some specs from the article: "It's 150-odd standard PC cases, with four drives in each.. 'Over 100 terabytes.. As plain text in book form, that'd be over 3000 miles of shelf space.." All I can say is.. Wow!"
It's a shame that some fo the more interesting moments in Internet history are so transient the wayback machine can't catch them.
e.g. The Ded Kitty picture we put up when napster shut down at the star of september, it was only there for a few hours but it will be lost.
Of course, some of the more interesting transient events are websites that are hacked, but there exist dedicated archives for this kind of event, so you can relive the hilarity of RIAA.org being repeatedly defaced.
Here. They seek to create physical items (clocks and libraries are two items they name) that will last for very, very long periods of time. This diagram shows what is meant by the "long now", and this is a link to their first prototype clock that is on display in the Science Museum in the UK (the second clock on the page).
We're not qualified to judge what "good stuff" is.
For example, a ciouple of centuries ago old household accounts would have been considered valueless. But today's historians find a wealth of social data in them - what did people eat? how much did they get paid? did families tend to enter service together? how often did servants get new clothes?
Disc space is cheap. Keep everything, let future historians sort it out.
Hint: Don't put security pages in your robots.txt which aren't supposed to be linked.... or at least secure them with a password.
http://www.zone-h.org/en/news/read/id=894/
Small personal thanks from me. I had put an online exhibit of my artwork up a few years ago, but unfortunately lost all of it by a harddrive failure. Much to my surprise I was able to find nearly all of my site, http://www.gpapassavas.com online and backed up on the WBM.
In presentations, Brewster says his policy is to take out the complainers. So if you think having your site in the Wayback Machine is a copyright infringement, he'll just take it out. Meanwhile he's taking the Napster approach: assume what you're doing is legal until someone tells you to stop. Hopefully that day won't arrive.
I disagree completely.
If you put something on the web, you have put it up for the world to see. The whole point of putting information on the web is making that information available to lots of people.
What the Internet Archive is doing is no different than libraries storing old copies of newspapers and magazines. With an increasing amount of things being published online, we need an archive of those things.
Years from now archives of web pages will be quite useful for those doing research on the events of today.
Say you are a student in the year 2050 and are doing a report on the "history of the web." Wouldn't it be nice to have copies of the web pages from the 1990s to show how the "early" web looked like?
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
on how long before a politician has to resign because of some over the top statements he/she made in a flamewar back in college? Or maybe that webpage of ethnic jokes that seemed so hilarious back in high school.
I have a feeling we are either going to have to become way more forgiving, or we're going to be stuck with only faceless boring types with no opinions as our leaders (no wisecracks, it could be much worse than it is now).
"It is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission."