Internet Archive Hosts 24-Hour Fund-Raising Telethon (archive.org)

martiniturbide writes: The Internet Archive, the online non-profit library that stores almost everything that is digital, the same one that hosts a lot of classic games , hosts a massive collection of MAME ROMs and runs the WayBackMachine to preserve the internet web pages.... started running an old fashioned, 24-hour fundraising telethon earlier today, 19 December, at 12:00 PM PST (20:00 UTC). This live event is being hosted by Michelle Krasowski and Jason Scott (the guy from Textfiles.com that Wants Your AOL & Shovelware CDs) with the support of several guests. You can visit the telethon live video and donate to support this library.

Comments

Jason Scott is a cool guy

[Transist]

Definitely support the work he does. Slight tangent, but if you haven't seen this DEFCON talk of his, you really should. It's hilarious. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Maybe

[Frosty Piss]

Well, if they come off like the pushy elitist "Wikipedians" at Wikipedia, no money from me. But I may toss a Abraham Lincoln or two their way.

Re:Maybe

[AthanasiusKircher]

Arguably one of the more important historical archives in the world and your support comes down to if you like the personalities?

Absolutely, when it's relevant. GP mentioned Wikipedia -- the personalities of the people running and managing Wikipedia are shaping the format of the project. Personally, I think that has caused the project to have fundamental flaws and should either die or morph into something better. Until that culture of personalities is changed, there's no way I will support Wikipedia, and in fact I'll argue with anyone I can that they should not only NOT support it but should actively work against it... I think the future of knowledge and the fundamental nature of epistemology is at stake.

With the Internet Archive, I've heard the values of the project and the people running it. Unlike Wikipedia, I think those values of those people are worth supporting, because they are likely to lead to a long-term sustainable archive.

It's not so much the personalities themselves, as much as how those personalities are reflected in the values and priorities of the project. And yes, those are important, because an archive done poorly with poor decisions made because of bad values is potentially worse... because such a bad archive will suck money and resources away from the building of a better alternative, as Wikipedia has done.

Site Down - YouTube Link

[BinBoy]

The site is down. You can view it on a live YouTube stream. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:These people need to get a life

[timrod]

Actually, archive.org makes a pretty big impact in a lot of fields, most notably data-based journalism and computer-assisted reporting. There are a lot of government agencies that will have story-relevant data up that they then wind up taking down - sometimes because of storage costs, other times because they're trying to hide something.

Maybe

[waspleg]

but you have no access to the NSA archive...

Re:How do they Regularly Pay for It?

[drinkypoo]

The Internet Archive not only hosts a backup of the entire internet,

Not only don't they, but they let the current domain holder determine whether content archived when someone else owned the domain determine whether content will be shown. That crops up for me more than half the time. Otherwise, I might donate.