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Google to Digitize National Archives Footage
Anil Kandangath writes "Google today announced their pilot program to digitize the entire video content of the National Archives and make it globally accessible for free on Google Video. The history of the world should be universally accessible and this is definitely a great step towards making sure that our history is not lost, and that everyone has equal and easy access towards such information. Google has provided some sample videos from the National Archives, such as the 1969 moon landing."
One small step for google kind?
The history of the world will be archived in the form of crappy, low resolution flash movies!!!
Betcha they don't make the Zapruder movie available. Betcha! It's these wily Republicans in charge now, their parents and grandparents probably had a finger in assassinating JFK and won't to cover it up.
Or maybe it's just that their natural secretiveness will extend to this.
But I betcha we don't get the Zapruder movie.
Infuriate left and right
So Google is archiving made-up stuff too?
CREST is a searchable database of CIA documents released under some executive order by Clinton. It's pretty cool. More importantly, it's free.
By "globally" they mean everywhere except China.
Archive.org could use their support too...their site performance is usually sluggish, though they already have some biggies sponsoring them, including HP, NSF and the LOC.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Google has provided some sample videos from the National Archives, such as the 1969 moon landing.
Yeah, how much you wanna bet the secret blooper reel from the fake moon landing filming don't show up on Google Video. You know, the one where Neil Armstrong bouncing wires get tangled in the cardboard landing module and crushes half the set. The one where Henry Kissenger accidentally wanders onto the "moon."
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Does this seem suspiciously like the giant-brain episode of Futurama to anyone else?
It all started as an innocent attempt to record and catalog everything in the universe.. but the brains decided they had to destroy the universe right after it finished recording the last bit of data, so things would stop happening and new data would not have to be recorded.
New webcomic updated on Sundays: HERE
How the hell is the US national archives the "history of the world"?
It's exactly what it says it is - the "US National Archives" - i.e. the US version of video recorded history, given whatever slant the news networks of the day were putting on things.
I'm not anti-American (I have American family), but I WISH the US would remember that they are ONE country in a VERY big world.
Jonathan Beckett http://www.pluggedout.com
I just wanted to say this makes me feel better after reading the HD DVD AACS news for most of the day!!
Think Deeply.
Assertion: Google is a bubble pure and simple. Where is their business case? I've always wondered, can someone enlighten me? They built a search engine in college that counts links and caches pages. They bought dejanews to cache USENET drivel. Wonder what will be the beginning of the end?
I am not so sure I trust Google anymore. I would think they would have no problems censoring based on government request. You'll be able to see old edison reels about the dog/sausage transmogrifier, but I bet selective quasi-current things, say Vietnam and newer, will be selectively censored.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
I do like the fact that Google is digitizing this footage, though IMHO the government spending money on doing that and providing the end result to the public would be a much, much better way to spend our tax dollars than several other much more expensive expensive government projects I can think of...
"The history of the world should be universally accessible and this is definitely a great step towards making sure that our history is not lost, and that everyone has equal and easy access towards such information. "
So put the entire thing on DVD's and mail everyone a copy who asks.*
*It's also the answer to the question, "what if the internet's down"?
But they're violating history's copyright!
as to call it the history of the world, but in all fairness to NARA, it has a great deal of captured documentation from the Second World War and some other sources. So, it's more than a mere history of America.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why can't the National Archives provide this service? I would like to see public property in the hand of the public.
How about productions by PBS and NPR? Where are their digital archives?
There's not a lot of political will for the government to digitize all this stuff on its own (at which point we might even insist that it be digitized in a proper free format...!). Google's offered to do the heavy lifting, NARA have offered to provide the material (which is public domain anyway).
If it really bothers you that you can't have 'em for download, well...you can pay for the digitization, too.
What a great way to build a free library without all those nasty copyright negotiations. Selling it off as a public service makes it even better.
bah.
On the right hand side, for instance of that moon landing page, click "Download". Pick iPod or PSP so you get an actual mp4 instead of a crappy google video player link.
Like the Truth.com commercial about tobacco companies.
"A tobacco company once gave $125,000 worth of food to a charity, according to an estimate by The Wall Street Journal. Then they spent well over $21 million telling people about it. I guess, when you sell a deadly, addictive product, you need all the good PR you can get."
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
"Universally" available means being available in an open format. Flash is not an open format. It is closed, poor quality, and only available for some operating systems.
If Google becomes a video content distributer of any significant stature, and consequently locks people into using Flash, they're going ever more against the "Don't Be Evil" marketing slogan.
There were free to access public libraries in the UK long before Carnegie.
Will this lead to the administration reclassifying more documents, or at a greater rate in order to prevent their global dissemination? BBC Story on Reclassification. There is some legitimate concern that having all those documents so readily available can pose a problem. I am less concerned about someone coming to city hall and looking at tax records than I am with universal availability of the same information online, and in a readily searchable form. I generally land squarely on the more access side, but this issue could lend credence to administration concerns.
I may be wrong, but isn't there pr0n in the National Archives?
Heck, I'll take low res but free and easily accessible format than nothing and have to comb through the archives by hand. Maybe part of the reason we're experiencing a period of such rapid technological advancement is because we're cutting back on research time via computerization and greater accessibility to data, so I think anything that helps towards that end (starting with the national archives) is a good idea.
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
But at what resolution?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
and _I_ wish the US would remember that they are ONE country in a VERY big world.
You should live here, it is unbelievable. One guy falls from a building in Chicago and it gets three minutes of the evening news. A mudslide in another country kills thousands and it only gets a few seconds.
Some other country may as well equal some other planet to most of my neighbors.
You *can* download off of google video. You just need google's video player.
Check the site. You can download these files instead of using the crappy plugin player. The download link is on the right side of the window.
The Ministry of Truth, Winston's place of work, contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below.
The Ministsry of Truth concerned itself with Lies. Party ownership of the print media made it easy to manipulate public opinion, and the film and radio carried the process further.
The primary job of the Ministry of Truth was to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels - with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary. Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston's job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs - to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.
freely derived from George Orwell, 1984. All rights reserved.
Courtesy Orwell Today, found through.. GOOGLE.
Oversimplifications aside, which one is Google? The visionary? Or the profiteer?
False dichotomy. Nothing prevents anyone from being both a visionary and a profiteer.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I've been working on a digital archives project here at work, and apparently there's an open source archive product called Fedora. One of the interesting features of it is that the archived format of the digital object can be different from the presented format of the digital object. So in the case of movies, you can archive a high-res MPEG4 or whatever format you want, but display it to web-based users as a crappy low-res Flash movie. When user requirements change (e.g., users' bandwidth dramatically increases), then you can change the format in which you deliver the archived objects without having to go through the archival procedure again. I can't imagine that Google isn't doing something similar.
The irritant here is, it's already ours. But we still won't be able to have a copy of our own public property without either Google's lousy flash player or several thousand dollars' worth of video conversion equipment and physical acess to the originals.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Not in every town there wasn't.
If this prevents me from sitting through another 'informative' speech in one of my classes about how the lunar landing never happened, then I'm all for it.
Nothing hides evidence like a stew. -Gus Pratt
>this is definitely a great step towards making sure that our history is not lost
possibly.. it could also be a lesson in data formats if the material is as volumnous as i think it is.. i've got a 10 year old cd of some dragonball z fansubs in some old divx(3.11aplha?) w/ a hacked audio codec.. it's tough to play those anymore.. silly extreme example, but for a more serious one, look at old software and the need for emulation.
if i were trying to sell a video codec, i would be begging for google to use mine in this endeavor.
Does this mean that this is the one service Google won't censor in China?
Are they going to digitize stuff that is than reclassified and will they KEEP it digitized, or will they fall to the pressures of the CIA?
...only in america
And you're basing this on what? Google seemed to have no difficulty standing up to the US government when it requested information from them. There are probably a lot of things you could criticize Google for, but a lack of willingness to stand up to the US government in defense of their legal rights has so far not been one of them.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Here's my favourite line from that page:
You can't get less evil than that.
From the BBC's announcement in August 2003:
you had me at #!
..Yeah, "Equal Access" to that 40% of the world owning computers with internet connection capability...
... that said, I suspect this will can be used to affect mass opinions, or to present influencive issues of history. As already pointed out, the a public property should be in public hands. And history is obviously different from railways, for example. (Slashdot people now don't ask me to not question Google the God)
I forgot to be anonymous.
Whole-heartedly Agreed!!!!!
... I would still like to see this content available en-masse and online.
/.
There are 100's of PBS shows that I've seen over the years, that I would LOVE to get my hands on!!!!
It begs that question as to why tax-funded PUBLIC programming ISN'T available to the public, except through the BUBE TUBE... I must say that PBS HiDef was one of the first O.T.A channels in are area though
On a related note, didn't they just cut funding for PBS over some B-S statistics or something?
I'd google-it, but am only lazy enough to post to
Oversimplifications aside, which one is Google? The visionary? Or the profiteer?
Yes.
Visionary profiteers is what the US was built on. Google just joins a very long list of them. Have a vision, bring it to the masses, make a pile of money. That is as American of a mentality as you can get.
Oversimplifications aside, which one is Google? The visionary? Or the profiteer?
Overlooking the fact that forcing the definition to be one or the other IS an oversimplification, I would have to say that Google is the profiteer, but not in the traditional sense of the word.
Google will certainly be making money off of this archive, in the form of AdWords revenue, but, in contrast with Ben Franklin's social library, it will cost the end user nothing. It's as if a library were funded not by taxes, but by local businesses. In return for the local businesses' funding, the library set up a pamphlet board at the front entrance, which allowed the businesses to place stacks of pamphlets or brochures about their company. Access to the information itself is free to everyone, but they walk past the pamphlet board on their way in and out, and by doing learn about these local businesses. In this analogous scenario, would it matter if the library was owned by a government or a private interest? The information is still freely available to all.
One could probably make the argument that having this information displayed by a private party is not optimal, since the private party could at any time censor which information they choose to show. However, I'm not sure it applies in Google's case, because the information being shown is the National Archives, which is maintained by a public, government body. Google would either be showing the ENTIRE National Archives, in which no private-interest bias exists*, or they would choose not to show it all, and it would be very clear to people that they are selectively excluding things.
It is altogether possible to make money off a noble goal, thus becoming both profiteer AND visionary. The best example is that of a doctor, but there are others.
I have no problem with Google offering this service: it will be better run than a National Archives established program, and the information will still be available for free to the general public. I think the difference is that the information contained in the Archives is public information. Therefore, even if Google goes under and can no longer support display of the information, it will still exist in the new digital format for someone else to make available.
-------------
*Note that this does not discount the existence of governmental bias. The National Archives are certainly not immune to revisionist history. However, for the purposes of our argument here, we must assume that the information itself, by the nature of being public, is untouched by bias.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
Isn't that what archive.org is doing?
http://www.archive.org/
They already have a huge repository, are supported by the National Science Foundation, Library of Congress, HP and others.
I don't think this is about providing information to the public, I think this is about Google being the gateway to all information..... seems if they wanted to be altruistic they'd support the efforts already underway rather than duplicate them.
This would be a great indirect response from Google to Verizon's asshattery of wanting to charge them for bandwidth. Google can say that they're simply trying to host the archives of important historical events and Verizon is attacking them for more money for bandwidth. Google comes out looking really good. I think they've hired a new marketing team. That's what this is all about!
"The history of the world should be universally accessible" is an idealistic thought. But who pays for the infrastructure that makes all of this free (as in beer) media possible? Don't start a free/Communist/pay/Capitalist flame war - I'm not taking a side, I just think that there's a growing trend to provide either free media or places for people to upload their own media, and I don't see what's paying for the hardware and people-ware to support it.
Think of it: if Wikipedia can function as a distributed encyclopedia maintained by self-interested parties, why not do the same with search-engine technology? This would eliminate central control, and fears that "the man" could rewrite digital history.
The name "Gnuugle" sort of conveys the idea: a distributed-index commons, if you will. Of course, others are possible -- maybe "Woogle"?
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Please, mind the signs. Do not feed the trolls. They get gas and that makes them even more obnoxious.
Do you think 1989's Tienanmen Square assault footage will be streamable from inside the great firewall of China?
-- Home is where you eat your heart out.
Let's put the entire Library of Congress online for free.
Particularly, of course, the FULL records of all copyright filings, which anyone would have the right to download an "examine"
Thank you! I hate this growing sentiment that if someone's doing something for profit it's automatically bad.
Google Video China (http://video.google.cn/) definitely does not show Google Video content from the US National Archive. Damn Google Censorship...
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
THis is the unedited audio recording of the moon landing.
It' really great news that "The History Of The World" will be universally accessible. If enough people watch it and apreciate it, maybe Mel Brooks will consider shooting Part II!
Here's a question for people: Where do you think that Google is going? I mean, what is there ultimate goal? Where do you see Google in 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years? How ubiquitous will they be? What services will they provide? Just some food for thought. Please respond.
I hate to break this to you, but for most of the history of "movies" it's all been pretty low-res. I watched those shots form the moon live in 1969, and it didn't look any better than what I just called called up on my extremely hi-res monitor. The main difference being that in 1969 my college student budget extended to a black and white tube set from the Salvation Army Trift Store. We're talking about an analog video squirt from the moon at a time when I was doing college physics and chemistry with a slide rule and calculus with a pencil.
These images are extremely important, and having them freely available is priceless. Rading about history is not the same as seeing the people involved. Seeing Churchill give a speech is far better than reading it. Seeing Nixon's Checkers speech is priceless.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
The left used to view taxes as a drain on the working man? Rich guys used to use their money to buy libraries instead of stupid hot air balloons? Maybe there is something to the term "good old days" after all. If you tell me they didn't have Microsoft Windows back then, I'm going to cry.
Was this put to a vote? Why should the government give away this critical legacy to a for-profit enterprise that, in many respects, is guilty of "domestic spying" to a greater extent than any U.S. governmental organization?
A quote from I, ROBOT went like this.. "And I suppose you would have shut down the internet to keep public libraries open" and to me it means nothing is absolute, but replaced by better things as time goes on.
The internet is a great big public library to a point. Maybe there should be some online libraries like nyc.publiclibrary.com where you can browse through what they have in their digital library. Each having different sets of books but ultimately being searchable through publiclibrary.com/.org so you can order a copy (digital or print via publisher (small cost there)).
I'm a big fan of traditional libraries and hope they never go away, but as long as information is out there and freely available WITHOUT digital RESTRICTION management keys and software, things should be just fine.
I wonder when people will get a clue and realize that making a buck isn't ALL of what life's about, but helping make the world more educated - smarter, etc.
Interesting. What is that thing you're typing on?
(stop imagining that the solution is someone elses problem "out there" to be solved by vast industrial central servers - just the personal computers around today can store all that data tens of thousands of times over - the trick is building a trustworthy yet open distributed common filesystem)
Answer in the end YOU are the people/hardware to support it
Luckily Google is hosting this footage to bring "fairness and balance" to the acrchived moon footage.
He happens to be wrong regarding the actual resolutions involved, but his question was entirely valid. Please don't knock people for asking questions. If no one asks questions, you only get what the first guy thought of. If everyone questions and debates (in a mature manner) however, you get the best people can come up with.
.com
Actually, I'd like to ask a related question. Are Google also providing the national archives with their OWN copy, in an open format, which they are free to use as they see fit? I know that's part of what the Libraries involved in Google Scholar/Books have been offered, and that's the only reason I think they should participate. It's all well and good that Google makes this stuff available online for free, but the stuff belongs to us all, and its digitisation shouldn't be restricted to google.com, or any other
The video you requested no matter what it was or how old, has been reclassified in the interest of National Security.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
So what if china (or another country) tells google to remove specific historial data from these archives?
Believe me, if I started murdering people, there would be none of you left.
that Scooty-Puff Junior sucks...
This is possibly the first video link ever to have graced the front page and survived a /.ing. Google has grown too strong... we must fear them.
But where is Google getting the money for all these cool projects? This one sounds like they're going to need a LOT of server space....and a lot of money
I watched the moon landing video from the link and it looked horrible. It was blocky, grainy, low-res and filled with compression artifacts. Does anyone know if Google plans on making higher quality video available in the future? I Google is archiving this stuff at a higher resolution and a much higher optical density, especially when doing high contrast space films.
Doing the USA National Archives is great. But the real challenge is digitizing the Library of Congress. I fear that a lot of the mid-level literature of the 'greatest generation' will be lost because of the Mickey Mouse copyright law. If the copyright starts roughly around 1925 and continues indefinitely due to roll-over extensions, then the books printed from 1925 through about 1995 will be locked up and possibly lost forever.
No one will risk being sent to gitmo for copyright by republishing 20th century books and the companies that 'own' them won't republish them because there is no profit in it. When the paper dissolves, they will be gone. Gone with them will be the ability of future historians to have insight into what made these people's thoughts, values, and development process that comes from examining literature from the period. There will always be some books from the era kept around, but the bulk will be lost.
I'm not worried about the books from 1995 on because the people from this era realize that copyright laws are just total bullshit. They will digitize and circulate their favorite written literature on P2P networks in the same manner that is already being done with music recordings. Many sci-fi books are available on Kazaa, but very little is there outside the sci-fi genre.
But this won't happen for the literature from the bulk of the 20th century. I've never met a single person who is digitizing (saving for prosperity) pop paperbacks. When they're gone, they're gone as if they had never been written at all.
I first noticed this when looking for a copy of Trevanian's Shibumi from 1979. Great book, but now getting difficult to find. There must be tens of thousands of books in this category.
That's why we should digitize the Library of Congress. A big job, that may not even be possible given the delicate state of many of the older books.
This land-grab for providing public access for free by a private corporation is a travesty. Just think about all the people whose property those archives are -- what about *their* rights?
... Oh, yeah. Nevermind.
Waitaminute
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
oval office footage of clinton getting a hummer.
What is slashdot?
What will happen when I suck all Google's videos into my own archive, then offer them to the public in competition with Google? Will Google claim copyright on the videos that belong to me, an American citizen, that they got from my National Archives?
--
make install -not war
just wondering
when Push Comes to Shove
Just FOIA for it through NARA. Then the archivists there will process it rather than the original agency, and NARA people are generally cool about declassifying previously declassified stuff. Problem is, they may reclassify again, so you'll have to repeat the cycle if you lose your stuff.
Other very useful archives, such as Pathe News, have already been released over the Internet. (Frankly, I think Pathe will prove much more useful for many world events - at least, those outside of England. For British history, the National Archives might be better.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'd always thought the moon had formed a few billion years ago.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Pathe News is already available. The BBC has some excellent high-definition TV-over-IP software. Whether this will actually be used by them is another question, but it would be nice. As I see it, the British have the technology and - God knows, after the BBC junked many of their archives in the 1970s - they have seen how easy it is to irretrievably lose key historical data.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There's some important material there that gets little attention. For example, there are only two "home videos" on the NFR, as far as I know. You can probably guess that the Zapruder footage from the Kennedy assassination is one. But the other one is by Dave Tatsuno, (who just died a week ago) interned at one of the Japanese-American relocation camps during the Second World War. His "Topaz" video is a glimpse of life for some Americans during a dark part of our history, that is often forgotten or glossed over by the propaganda of the period. (Look up "Topaz," which was the name of Tatsuno's camp, in the National Archive search engine and see what I mean.)
But to some "anarchists", this is a dream of public information, communication and access beginning to be realised (a phrase due to Tony Smith).
you had me at #!
Maybe you read a different write up then I did. The one I read has this sentence:
Course, maybe my American bias is clouding the issue.
I'm confused ....
From your account, Franklin sold stock in his library, and Carnegie donated money for the ones he built.
Oversimplifications aside, which is the visionary and which the profiteer?
Why does it have to be one or the other? While I admit that doing good (being the visionary) without making any profit seems a nice theory, in practice there is nothing inherently wrong with making money from your efforts to help people, as long as the money doesn't limit the amount of help you can give. For example, is a person who volunteers at an orphanage any better than a person who works there full time? I don't think so, unless the person working there demands such a wage that the orphanage can't support itself. Fairy tales about knights in shining armor are just that...fairy tales. As long as google provides open access to the information, why shouldn't they be allowed to make profit from it?
In what way is DRMing public recording, and making them only play in a proprietary player making things available? If google wants to make things useful, convert them to mpgs. They're useless in this format.
Sheesh! My Memes page is anything but a vision of what the web/net might be. It's just a mess of stuff that only makes sense together to me.
But, yes, I was sold in 1981 on the online potential as a small 'p' political medium, without at the time having noticed the earlier work of Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson et al. Though I only spoke about it in private confidence, my betting at that time was that we would all finish up doing our information work inside a universally interconnected MMORPG. Still might happen when somebody develops the MSN killer.
"Anarchist" is also an insufficient label for somebody who has burnt a lifetime organising and whose vocabulary has moved on to "devolution" and "diversity".
On the subject of video archives I really don't care as long as somebody can get me Mavis Bramston. The medium is not the only massage in the Storyverse[TM].
What I'm really hanging out for is Apple to hook the 56" Chi Mei display to the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL so I can make real use of OmniGraffle (4 Professional, for SVG), with a fully optioned runout G5 tower to make the most of it, courtesy a perceptive sponsor.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
... you insensitive clod!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-341997986 3678943505&q=zapruder
The best though is their name for the google national archive archive: gnaa.
The internet is a great big public library to a point. Maybe there should be some online libraries like nyc.publiclibrary.com where you can browse through what they have in their digital library. Each having different sets of books but ultimately being searchable through publiclibrary.com/.org so you can order a copy (digital or print via publisher (small cost there)).
Imagine this. Instead of Amazon having warehouses of books, and distribution centers, how about they just have a database of postscript files. You pay Amazon for the book, and local printers download the postscript files, print them, and bind them, and you in a day or so? They could still mail them if you want.
and people-ware
What the hell is that? Arms and legs and ears and eyes? Purchase commodity or D-I-Y! I hear the Chinese Government is taking orders now.
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. - William Gibson
google videos tend to have a pretty medicore resolution. It's too bad that these videos will likely lose a lot of their sentiment by being displayed at lo-res.
ôó
that the mpaa/riaa is going to have a problem with this?
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
You're right, but as the poster says "The history of the world should be universally accessible."
Now my country has birthed a bigarse huge/scary megacorporation with a passion for proliferating content, much of it free, and is now happily dumping all of the video history we have onto the table, for the world's benefit.
Tell me, what did YOUR country do to help reach the common goal?
I'm not saying we're saints just because we shared our video collection. But I am saying that before you go whining about how people shouldn't be celebrating America, maybe you should have a contribution of your own to hold up alongside ours?
If you don't, maybe a little less whining and a little more [working towards getting your own country's video archives released for the rest of the worlds benefit] might be in order?
I've already been called on it above. But I'm not going to keep apologising for the phrasing to everyone who hits Reply...
What I meant to say was along the lines that this kind of initiative expresses some tiny fraction of the web's potential, remembering that we are dealing with a medium that is barely born. I would also opine that by their carelessness, many content providers on today's web don't really 'get' its larger ideas.
you had me at #!
Forgive me if this is a repeat, but Google is solely offering up the US version of history, sadly.
As an American, I'd love to see more of the world from the rest of the world, but apparently I can't look to Google for that.
And here I was thinking maybe I could.
Anyone have any good suggestions for me on this front?
Does it bother anyone but me that the words said when man stepped foot on the moon have been edited? He blew his lines, and it has been changed in all the tapes. I can't believe the Archives saved the changed version. I was hoping to hear the original in all its embarrassing glory.
This now seems to be blocked to the UK (and probably everywhere outside the US).
Way to go Google.
Google may think they are being philanthropic, but they haven't thought this one through.
n g/funding.htm
There is a distinct possibility it may be the result of a competitive intelligence operation by Googles competitors.
Lets analyze the political forces involved.
Google is planning to offer, free, various library material that American taxpayers have spent billions of dollars collecting, producing and organizing. This money comes from federal, state, and local public funds as well as various private contributions, all of them usually with some sort of encumbrances.
There is always less funding for libraries than is needed, but this year represents a major shortfall. http://www.ala.org/ala/washoff/WOissues/washfundi
Its an election year, and funding for schools and libraries are LOCAL politics, sure to be major issues in what promises to be many highly contested elections.
Google has lots of enemies http://wired.com/wired/archive/13.12/google.html who won't hesitate to take advantage of a situation like this; and they have plenty of lobbyists.
Here is my prediction.
Google goes ahead with their plans. Shortly after the elections, the GAO, various federal, state and local governments announce that they sueing to recover the costs of the material Google made available that was not within the encombrances posed by the original donations of funds. For bonus points, they may include the various penalties imposed by intellectual property acts as various parties assert rights to specific items in the distributed material.
*Poof* no more shortfall in library funding in the US, though Google shareholders might be a tad upset. There probably won't be a Sarbanes Oxley prosecution, and, who knows, a hostile takeover due to a cash flow crisis might be good for Google
I LIKE it... The empire strikes back with a competitive intelligence operation at it's finest. This is so much more fun than, say, a chair being thrown by a CEO or getting some congresspeople to complain about censorship. I can't wait to see if this plays out the way it looks.
Google is normally not this naive; they have competant legal staff who should have pointed all this out. I wonder what else is going on?
Reminds me (most closely) of the archives employed in Heinlein's For Us, The Living. I don't think I'll ever get enough of innovation following suggestion by science fiction. :)
-=[You cannot consistently judge this statement to be true.]=-
Hi FuturePastNow,
can you point out to me how I can change the user-agent of Mozilla/Seamonkey... I googled quite a bit but couldn't find anything. I vaguely remember getting to a long list of preferences when typing some keyword with a colon at the end into the address bar...
How do Mac/Linux versions of Mozilla identify themselves?
Thanks in advance,
Florian
We did go fight their damned war for them.
Thanks. That's the comment I was looking for.
The government of the United States has not in the past been particularly committed to its record-keeping. NARA as we know it is a fairly recent development.
As a budgetary priority, NARA falls pretty far down the list. Homeland Security (and its older brother, National Security) takes precedence, then the various entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare). Further down, there are the uncounted and uncountable tons of earmarked congressional pork--money given to individual congressional constituencies.
As a vote-getter, preserving the nation's history for the ages is a non-starter. Politicians, who seek election, and bureaucrats, who court the favor and funding of those same politicians, would much rather tell the voters about how much safer they are from Terror, or how many drugs they will be able to buy, or how many bridges to nowhere will be built.
A true cynic might suggest that it is in the interests of those people presently in power for future historians to be ignorant of the extent and nature of their improvidence.
Now THAT would really kick some ass. :P I love books! I think if they were all weighed it would come up close to 1000 pounds worth of books. Geez!