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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.
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.
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).