Slashdot Mirror
Web Heritage Could Be Lost
Squiff writes "The British Library warns us that 'The UK's online heritage could be lost forever if the government does not grant a "right to archive"' in the UK. Never mind the Wayback Machine, The British Library declares that 'the average life expectancy of a website was just 44 to 75 days, and suggested that at least 10% of all UK websites were either lost or replaced by new material every six months,' with the material within them being amongst the most revealing regarding the state of contemporary culture."
I really miss the Internet of the mid-90's...back when Netscape was king, an animated .gif was exciting, and Vivo Video was used for streaming. I know things were much more primative then, but there was a certain charm that just isn't present on today's Internet. ::sigh::
Living With a Nerd
Why in the world would anyone in the future care about a website that barely even stuck around for a month. Anything of significance will either stick around, or be archived by others who find it significant.
Also, that average seems absurdly low, are they counting in dynamically generated pages that exist only as long as they are viewed or something?
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
I imagine the Wayback Machine is far better than it used to be, but historically it hasn't been that inclusive. Most of my old Quake site is still there, but other sites from the same time period are gone.
One of my favorite sites ate the time was Yello There, a parody of Blue's News that had me laughing out loud almost daily. Harriot updated the site almost daily, yet the only page out of the thousands there were that still exist is one that I'd posted on my own site ("Kneel" and I were unknowingly fans of each others' sites and eventually became good online friends and did a lot of cross-posting and collaboration).
Sadly, "Kneel" had Muscular Dystrophe and the last I heard could no longer write. I think Harriot died a few years ago, and his online work has vanished, except for that one page.
Free Martian Whores!
Does the UK really want to be remembered for their craptacular websites? Not that theirs are any worse than anybody else's, but please ... most websites are like a night of bad drinking. Let's move on already and let time take care of the rest.
"Web heritage"? Are you kidding me?
The world would be a worse place than it is now if every iteration of every myspace profile or of every online store was saved somewhere. Good riddance!
And 99% of all websites are boring, useless, commercial, or self-serving. Let them die...tomorrow would be too soon.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Really, we didn't record some website in Britain. This will matter historically how?
No sigs in BETA. Beta SUCKS.
The British Library should declare independence.
I would imagine that Google could easily expand their caching technology to facilitate the preservation of everything everyone has to say on the internet. I can understand where the Libraries are coming from. In an effort to chronicle the growth of human culture they keep archives of literature, periodicals and most other media, so why not the internet?
Via the Wayback Machine, appropriately enough, James Gleick offers this.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Those who control the present control the past.
Those who control the past control the future.
History is important. Having access to history is just as important. What you consider trivial now may be important later.
"The British Library declares that 'the average life expectancy of a website was just 44 to 75 days, and suggested that at least 10% of all UK websites were either lost or replaced by new material every six months,' with the material within them being amongst the most revealing regarding the state of contemporary culture.""
Twitter and facebook. If that doesn't say what the present state of contemporary culture is, then I don't know what does?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Damn you spell checker, damn you.
If I see a "sky is falling" thread in slashdot, more often than not it is from a UK source.
With such a long, rich history I'm almost surprised they'd be concerned about this. Then again, I suppose the British Library understands, better than most, the value of archiving content. That said, I'm fairly certain most things of value have been stored away somewhere. But without a doubt there's a point at which we need to cull what has little value, which in all honest, is most of what is found on the internet.
I'm reminded of these preservation societies which seem to be especially prevalent here in the northeast US which go out of their way to get every last minor structure designated as a historical landmark, often to the detriment of beneficial development projects. A couple of years ago this whole area of a city in my area was cleared out, except for this single multi-family home. I'd drive by on the highway and see this huge open field in the middle of which sat this lone dilapidated house. It turns out that some early baseball player was either born there or had grown up there for a few years and one of these groups all of a sudden got it in their heads that they needed to protect the house and force the city to restore it. No one had given a crap about it for all the years it sat there or had suggested doing anything with it until the time had come to tear it down. The fight to protect it dragged on for at least a year. All this effort to preserve an insignificant historical footnote. They finally lost, but by then it was a moot point as the city was facing so many other issues that this redevelopment project hasn't yet gone through.
Most of the internet isn't worth preserving and what has been preserved, in all kinds of media, should paint a very clear picture of the content of the internet over the years. And often what is considered historical significant is different looking back compared to people living through that time. This is especially true with pop culture. Every little thing is the most important thing in the universe until it's forgotten two weeks later.
When bold 48pt yellow text on red background flashing banners were on every website. When AOL opened the flood gates to the internet for the stupid. When spammers thought they were cool.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Save the Internets of yore!
NPLZ. Why was this posted?
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
That's the original graphics, displayed in a non-original format (not covering the whole page).
But is that the original music? I don't think so. Then again, I'm just relying on my memory.
Seriously. In the 90's, in the era where free webpages were hosted at Xoom, Angelfire and Geocities, the trend was static content (php pages for free, huh? Yeah, right), and there was a ton of webpages dedicated to a myriad of topics. People had to maintain their webpages by adding articles which were available through a series of navigational menus.
Then, everything changed. Webpages were replaced with disorganized blogs where people just complained about their lives. But some people got the right idea and began making specialized blogs about topics. Then the trend switched to news and editorials instead of static content, and wikis took the place traditional webpages used to occupy.
As of today, there are no personal webpages anymore. Everything's conglomerated in social networks, forums, wikis and specialized blogs. The era of webpages is now gone.
Point them into homes and at computer screens.
99% of the sites were just pages consisting simply of long lists of hyperlinks to other pages that consisted simply of long lists of hyperlinks. Oh, and some of them were members of web rings. Yeah, that's all worth saving...
So in ten years is someone going to be raising the alarm about the potential loss of millions of blogs and tweets, and how we might forget just how many people had tasty sandwiches that day or hated their math teacher?
#DeleteChrome
Say what you will about the Mesopotamians, but they knew how to make a damn funny lolcat. Shame that all their backup tapes were papyrus. ;)
Anything of significance will either stick around, or be archived by others who find it significant.
Nah, you have too much faith in popular culture. Wikipedia will always, always have a complete list of Pokemon. And that's fantastic. But here's the tricky bit... if something that is significant *is* lost, how do you know that it was a) significant or b) existed in the first place. That's why it's so hard to think of an example. What we get is: "if only someone saved this information that would be really useful to me right now so I don't have to reinvent it..." You didn't know yesterday that you needed that information. Today you have a new job to do.
There's another important factor to consider. Sabotage. Websites die every month from server failure or hacking. All the common sense and backup policies in the world won't limit someone who's well funded mission is to disrupt your web presence. It might not even be you they target, if it's your data center (like say Amazon S3) all those people are hooped. Some of them were researching cures for diseases. You can't just go back to handwritten notes and catch up.
You're aware that in war, libraries and archives are destroyed early on? Best way to annihilate a culture is destroy the records of its existence. It happens today like it happened 2500 years ago. If they were successful we might not even know libraries existed 2500 years ago. Maybe 4000 years ago they were successful. We can't know.
Why should you care about 10 years ago or 1000? You don't need to be a history major to see the point:
What we are, is because of what we were. So what should we be next?
I have been downloading the internet since the mid 90s.
This is fast becoming a huge issue, and not just for Britain. There are legal and permissions and privacy problems that have to be addressed or nearly all of our digital works will simply vanish, in the not too distant future. The wayback machine doesn't even begin to address the issue. Dynamic and web2.0 sites often have metadata and links that are only valid if the site is working as intended - a snapshot will not work to capture it. A lot of valuable information not available elsewhere is already lost as people stop paying for various freemium accounts or hosting fees or as companies go out of business. Sometimes that data gets saved (Netscape's javascript development site, saved by Mozilla.org, UseNet groups saved by Google) but many more times it does not. I've attempted to write up some of the issues here: Proposal: Advance Directives for our digital legacies http://thedesignspace.net/MT2archives/000743.html
I always hated the term "pack rat." It is highly offensive to me that people consider it a negative quality to save "trivial" or "useless" things. Just think of all the people who threw their Golden Age comics in the trash because they weren't worth saving.
Whenever I migrate to a new PC, I always archive the entire HDD (minus meaningless OS and software installations) onto a folder in the new system. My friends think I'm silly to do this, but a few weeks ago I had a great time traveling down memory lane to see what I had been up to back in the early 90s.
I miss PLATO. Back in the mid-seventies, this was amazing, absolutely mind-blowing: real-time text chat, multiplayer biplane dogfights, and chess, and galactic conquest ... on a global network. Granted, the screen was monochrome (orange on black), but the resolution was better than anything around. And it was a touchscreen. Good times!
-kgj
Google doesn't ask for permission, why should the library?
This makes no sense, other than the workers are just too scared to go against the "rules" and do what should be done.
I think that a notice should be sent to the webmaster, specifying the location of the archive, with a form to fill out for take down.
But not permission. That's unnecessary.
Do you ask permission of the publisher, or of anyone for that matter, when you go to the library and read a book off the shelf?
We preserve the things that matter [..] The accumulated works of Geocities do not fit that criteria
Geocities had an *extremely* high ratio of junk:worthwhile material. Yet with a decent search engine, it is- or was- quite easy to avoid the junk and access the useful stuff.... if it had been kept online, that is.
To be honest, I was going to mention Geocities anyway, because it's pertinent to this discussion of "web heritage". When it closed down, all the material was taken offline. Is it permanently lost or still stored offline in a known place?
While Yahoo's decision to kill Geocities might make sense at first glance, IMHO it didn't when you considered the matter. Many of you are probably thinking that it would have required a lot of (a) storage, (b) bandwidth and (c) attention that was no longer worth Yahoo's time. But consider this.
As far as I can tell, the majority of content on Geocities was around a decade old- very few sites appear to have been updated after the early-2000s. That was a long time ago, and the average size of consumer web content - and the ability to store and transmit it - has grown massively in the past decade. Sure, there were a *lot* of sites; but how big was your average website in the late-90s dial up era? By modern, YouTube era standards, tiny- both in storage and bandwidth requirements.
(In fact, after I first speculated on this, I found out that the total storage for Geocities came to- IIRC- single-figure terabytes. Significant- although not ridiculous- by late 90s standards. A few cheap hard drives' worth today.)
Yahoo want people to move onto other services and/or don't want the administrative hassle? Fine. Archive the sites and make them non-updatable (except for an option allowing the owners to download and/or permanently remove their content). Under such circumstances I'm willing to bet that the revenue from the advertising (that Geocities has always been plastered with) would more than outweigh the very modest storage, bandwidth and administration costs.
Not saying that they'd get rich, just that they'd probably make significantly more than it cost to keep the site running.
I suspect that the real reasons for closing Geocities probably had more to do with either indirect legal issues (tax write-offs, accounting and the like) or some executive who wanted to be seen doing something that looked more significant than it actually was.
That said, I don't entirely disagree that some things aren't worth keeping, and indeed I think the world may have already crossed the line where we're keeping too much data for our own good. Nor was I ever a major fan or user of Geocities- yet I do think it's kind of a shame that the whole thing was taken offline wholesale when there was no *real* reason to do so.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I still have a webpage! ... I hope I didn't catch the poor guy's server on fire with a /.ing)
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(ok, not my site, but funny
Not really... it's just that no-one here refers to a "British accent" (though they might say an "English accent" or a "Scottish accent" even though there is almost as much variation within those countries). So you know that when the phrase is mentioned, it's by Americans, meaning one of those stupid stereotypical accents used by supposedly-representative upperclass stereotypes of the British/English (*) used to pander to American audiences.
:-( )
:-) Damn, I think I defended the English more than I meant to here! And if you come to Scotland, we probably won't do to you what they did to the American tourist in Trainspotting (which definitely *wasn't* pandering to them!)
(Then again, there are plenty of British actors who'll whore and Uncle Tom themselves out for the Yanks doing this sort of shit for American TV
Ditto Hollywood using English accents for the bad guys, or for some sort of snobbish repressed stereotype- even though Americans are arguably more uptight about sex and the like, and socially very conservative as well. (Okay, that's a generalisation, but I didn't claim it wasn't).
I mean, I wonder if I'd get away with organising expensive holiday tours for Americans letting them stay in "authentic English homes" and putting the lot of them up in a run down housing estate. (^_^)
(*) Used interchangably in this situation though English -|-> British; being Scottish myself, I'll happily point that out as often as necessary
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Stumbled on an old TV show called, northwest backroads, showing cool places around the northwest. They keep saying "for more information go to the website" which is no longer up.....