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."

Comments

Sadness

[Pojut]

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::

Re:Sadness

[The Archon V2.0]

I know things were much more primative then, but there was a certain charm that just isn't present on today's Internet. ::sigh::

I didn't mind primitive. I could browse with images off and only use Netscape's "image" button when I needed it. Got the most out of my dialup that way.

What I DID mind was having to try find content by drilling down hierarchical lists or using keyword-based searches and then using half-broken webrings to try go from the on-topic but often lame page that came up to a page that actually had good content.

Really, probably the one thing about the modern Internet I couldn't live without would be Google in specific and improved search engines in general.

Oh, and no blink tags. Drove me crazy.

why?

[Sir_Lewk]

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?

Re:why?

[Dunbal]

Why in the world would anyone in the future care about a website that barely even stuck around for a month.

      Data mining. Anything you say can and will be held against you. Especially if it was published on the internet. What, you think this is something FOR the people?

Re:why?

[u38cg]

Some of the most valuable information you can gets your hands on as a historian is ephemera. Victorian household accounts books are a goldmine. Going further back, commonplace books record a treasure trove of information about what life and culture was like. It's not difficult to imagine a historian in 2200 examining early 21st century attitudes to religion by analysing ceiling cat v. basement cat.

Way Back When

[mcgrew]

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.

Sounds like a job for Google

[Alamoth]

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?

Culture is like yogurt...

[Ostracus]

"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?

What's a webpage?

[Spy der Mann]

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.