Slashdot Mirror
BBC To Dispose of Douglas Adams Website
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC has announced their intention to dispose of the H2G2 website, originally founded by Douglas Adams. This comes as part of an initiative by the BBC to cut their online spending by 25%. 'BBC Online will be reorganised into five portfolios of "products." All parts of BBC Online have to fit with these. Over the past year all areas of the site have been reviewed to see where, and if, they fit. Sadly ... H2G2 does not fit in the new shape of BBC Online. However, H2G2 is unusual. It is a pre-existing community that the BBC brought into its fold, not a community that the BBC set up from scratch. So rather than closing it, we've decided to explore another option. This process has been referred to elsewhere as the "disposal" of H2G2. I'll admit this is not a great choice of words, but what is means is that we'll be looking for proposals from others to take on the running of H2G2.' One option under discussion is a community buyout."
They need to build a bypass. It's gotta be built, and it's gonna be built.
From TFA: However, H2G2 is unusual. It is a pre-existing community that the BBC brought into its fold, not a community that the BBC set up from scratch. So rather than closing it, we've decided to explore another option.
Now wait and see how many comments about deleting the site are posted here, and marvel at the number of people who don't read TFA...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Clearly, they needed to form a giant board of chairmen like Wikipedia, since it was essentially a take on Wikipedia, anyway. They needed to get all of the content to be created for free by the community. And moderated for free by the community. And edited for free by the community. And promoted for free by Google and other places that contribute to them and serve their content. And then have all that expensive primarily-text-based bandwidth to serve that apparently costs more than gold. Then hire on a ton of board members so they could justify a $20,000,000.00/yr non-profit expense to keep it running.
Not particularly. It was a flash in the pan that everyone thought was cool and you never heard about, again. It was sort of an early Wikipedia; more like Everything (which in itself was a concept that was exciting and fun for about 48hrs and then you never thought about, again).
1999: http://slashdot.org/story/99/04/28/1821246/Web-Based-Hitchhikers-Guide-to-the-Galaxy
Thing is, Adam's vision was fully implemented with Wikipedia + smartphones. Or Google, or some other combination of teh tubes . But any way you cut it H2G2 is a site for fan boys and not a really useful Guide - such Guides exist elsewhere. I'm all for fanboydom, but everyone's cutting budgets (my department has lost a prof and lots of grad student support); this seems a fairly inconsequential thing to lose.
And the search? Curiously, the article titled "Earth" is the tenth result for the search term "Earth".
I will stand here and wait for the TARDIS to arrive and for The Doctor to save it.
Seriously, how improbable is that?
Even if infinitely improbable, for this job, we're in good shape.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
A bit of background for what's so costly: http://doctormo.org/2011/01/24/bbc-to-shutter-h2g2/
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
The same thing happened in the 60s/70s with video tape (the stuff cost a fortune, and nobody thought people were going to care about the programs they were erasing 50 years in the future), and again with websites until crawling and archiving became commonplace.
No, Peter Jones. Why do you ask?
You seem to be under the impression that the H2G2 site is the work of Douglas Adams or a site about his work.
Instead it is a big community-wiki sort of thing inspired by the eponymous Guide itself, about Life, the Universe and Everything.
It's not really clear that shipping the server to Adams' family would achieve anything. In a sense the H2G2 site belongs to its many contributors, who presumably will be happy with it being sold off so long as their site stays live and their community can persist.
#define struct union
H2G2? Never heard of it, don't care. Good Riddance, I guess.
Never heard of it! But it was clearly advertised in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of The Leopard".
The BBC also incinerated film copies of the episodes. My understanding is that this was done in order to save space in their archive. (I remember something about a leaking roof.)
When foreign stations licensed the show, they were sent copies of the episodes with instructions to return them or destroy them after broadcast. A number of episodes that survived did so because those stations failed to follow through. They violated the BBC's copyright (presumably unintentionally due to poor license compliance). Ironically, such episodes survived because of copyright infringement.
Beyond the loss of Web material like the Hitchhiker's Guide site, or of software for no longe obtainable platforms, I fear we may face a similar situation in the future due to DRM. The Doctor Who case demonstrates that the copyright holder cannot always be trusted with preservation of significant works[1], and copying is the best insurance against destruction.
[1] I emphasize significant works, by which I particularly mean those that are distributed widely. (Not personal journal articles as mentioned by another poster.) When works are distributed to the public, the public gains an interest in them. This interest is not reflected in law, but it does exist. (Indeed, I would argue that this interest arises because the public, through its activities of interpretation and evangelism, creates much of the value of such works. Think Star Wars or Rocky Horror.)
Wow, they deleted the moon landing itself? Up to now I always thought they only deleted the recordings.
So all those who say there was no moon landing are right after all?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I spent most of yesterday afternoon face-down on the sofa crying a little. I joined h2g2 on May 12th 1999, and have spent a significant amount of time there almost every day since. That's almost 12 years of memories. Good friends I have met, (really - it's not just an "online community", people would get together in "real life" too.) tremendous info and insights. They were doing blogging in the form of "Journals" before the word "Blog" was coined. They had a crowdsourced encyclopaedia years before Wikipedia was launched. I hope that someone takes the site over, but I can foresee huge legal problems when the time comes to split it away from the BBC site, as it will have the same usernames and passwords as thousands of BBCi accounts.
Yeah, we should just scrap the BBC and let Rupert cunting Murdoch take over everything instead.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it