Scobleizer - Latest Comments in Our disappearing web

Re: Our disappearing web

gary S. — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 01:35:17 -0000

I think that all web creation tools/packages and all web sites should have a button availible to their creators that, once pressed, sends the web page to sites like the internet archive that strips off the security bits and pieces and just saves the important parts for future people to access. It is sad that when information storage devices grow exponentially in size, that we lose these old web sites due to hardware/software crashes.

Re: Our disappearing web

Social Media Marketing — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 20:43:47 -0000

Nice Post, I like such stuff a lot. Keep up the great work and thanks a lot.

Re: Our disappearing web

CoolProducts — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:45:40 -0000

With as much new content being added to the web each and every day, I don't see how stuff cannot disappear.. Think of it this way, if it did not.. how much more redundant would searches be than they already are?

Re: Our disappearing web

Funny Guy — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 12:41:36 -0000

Nice post, I love funny stuffs like this, keep on with your good work!

Re: Our disappearing web

Erick — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 11:18:53 -0000

The Hotmail ad comment is simply mean. I suppose techies should know better--in fact, true techies should send their letters from gmail--but the culprit here is Hotmail.

Re: Our disappearing web

Raegan — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 05:45:42 -0000

Things will stick around. The web is timeless.

Re: Our disappearing web

tophtucker — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 17:41:21 -0000

As information becomes more flexible, it becomes more fragile...

Re: Our disappearing web

FrankX — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 10:58:12 -0000

Reminds me of EH Carr's observation in What is History?

He was writing a thesis on the Peloponnesian War, and had on his desk a stack of volumes containing pretty much everything that had been written on the subject. This made him wonder how, of everything that had ever been observed and known about the war, these few volumes came to be "the facts" and "the history" of the war.

In many respects, we have acquired outsized expectations for what should last and in what amount of detail.

Re: Our disappearing web

Chris Lang — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 10:18:01 -0000

Since your words are stored in so many different ways all around the world on 1000s of different machines and even digital media, I would say that you have a better chance of your words surviving longer than 100 years.

Mostly due to the proliferation of social media and cloud storage databases.

I have the backup CDs to my complete files from 99, my first computer.

How enduring this format may be and the actual digital media it is recorded on is another story.

As far as library fires go, the greatest loss was the burning of the Egyptian Royal library at Alexandria. Probably the greatest loss of what the ancients really knew and the history of ancient Egypt. Like how the pyramids were built. Not to mention Greek history stored there when they dominated the region.

I wonder if any of our current knowledge will be looked back upon as having been worthy enough to mourn the loss?

Re: Our disappearing web

DC Crowley — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 01:49:07 -0000

You need to print everything a few times and save it at various locations around the world. It might just survive then. But what happens if one of the smaller video hosting guys goes bust... or a photo sharing site... yeah I have the stuff somewhere... but will I go to the trouble all over again? If one of these services were to go down then I hope a big player would step in to offer support in moving assets

Re: Our disappearing web

stuartthompson — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:18:59 -0000

It is a reminder how quickly data is lost when you consider that many people could not tell you the names of their great-grandparents let alone what they did or who they were. We'll be forgotten just as quickly.

As for the words: if they have impact then they will be copied, not as the result of an editorial decision but in celebration of what they say. Quality information will be copied, quoted, and preserved because of the inspiration it brings to others.

However, must information will unfortunately be lost and it is not for any editor to dictate what will be interesting to a future set of readers. I've read Homer and Livy, along with many other celebrated works. I'd actually be more fascinated to read journals written by a commoner from back then (not that many could write, but for the sake of argument). I'd be interested to know what occurred in their day to day lives. Perhaps future generations will be fascinated to know what it was like to have cats as pets when our world looks like Terminus and no room for pet animals remains.

Re: Our disappearing web

LuLu W-L — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 14:49:14 -0000

First I want to applaud you for going to the LoC and talking to Mr. Kahle. Digital preservation is a serious issue in archives today and one that archivists around the world are tackling. Unfortunately with proprietary formats being so prevalent, there is little guarantee that the content will stick around very long if you just let it sit. I actually encourage ppl with digital photos on their HD to print out the ones they want their grandchildren to see. In this area there is exciting open format work being done to preserve content however and archivists are coming up with creativity solutions to capture the linking/concept mapping that is happening with the web today.
There has been an explosion in content over the past 100 years and the internet has contributed greatly to the crush of information. I don't forsee all of the content from so many blogs being captured for antiquity. I laud what Mr. Kahle is doing but I find that he is (1) lacking a good access and retrieval system (2) really doing a disservice by capturing so much, because what is important becomes irrelevant. Yes, I am actually argue against equity when preserving history. But Ah! there is the point. What is important?! But surely not everything? If so then who decides? In archives archivists have begun annotating historical documents to explain why they are keeping what they do. They recognizie that there is little objectivity anymore. And unfortunately, historically, the powerful usually decide what to keep and what is remembered. This is frightening (and trust me its done in totalitarian regimes every day!), but something archivists fight against every day! This is part of what makes this small, little-known job of the archivist one of the most important in our information saturated world today.

Re: Our disappearing web

Scott Maentz — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 13:16:09 -0000

My concern is all about how our grandkids and great grandkids will remember us, if at all. And what about their kids and grandkids? We're the first generation with this unique opportunity to preserve our thoughts, pictures and video for generations who follow us hundreds of years from now.

Robert says, "I own and share my data. Owning it lets me share forever. I think that’s better than letting a company own it and share it on my behalf." Beg to differ, Robert, but you are not going to be here forever. Who's going to manage it when you're gone? Your kids? Doubtful.

Are we all willing to let everything we share and think just fade away? Seems like there's a better way and I, for one, am committed to working on this. http://remembergranny.com/?...

Re: Our disappearing web

Dan Lyke — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 12:05:54 -0000

I don't know if the words will last a century or not, but what struck me about the Google from 2001 was how much better the web was back then. Searches found good stuff, not just hucksters trying to sell us cheap crap, there were personal web sites with people I want to communicate with, not lots of spamming "young ladies" from foreign parts trying to friend us on Facebook, there were papers and publications and informed speculation, not just a bunch of teaser abstracts trying to get us to pay for access for the full PDF.

So I guess that what's important and worth remembering is getting hidden in the noise, and if 99% of the web doesn't make it to the next decade, let alone century, how are we going to know if anything of value got lost?

Re: Our disappearing web

Walt Ribeiro — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 01:03:58 -0000

Interesting how far we'll go to try to Archive EVERYTHING. I think its important from an information perspective, because as we archive more, then future generation become smarter - but where do we draw the line. I think as computers become faster and the techniques for storage become more productive, etc. then archiving won't be as 'difficult'. As a result, I feel it may take years until we start archiving everything, so this post possibly might not make it to the year 3,000, but others may. Robert - Interesting to think about this though none the less.

Re: Our disappearing web

Lacy Kemp — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:26:26 -0000

This reminds me a bit of Winston and the memory hole. Are we in Orwellian times? It's something to think about, but we have enough to worry about these days.

Re: Our disappearing web

Ontario Emperor — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:02:04 -0000

Referring to mike n's post, the difficulty is in determining what will be important in 2108, and what won't be. Perhaps information about our cats WILL be important in the future; I have no way of knowing. Bear in mind that the majority of the contemporaries of Johann Sebastian Bach probably wouldn't have bothered to save his old-fashioned work. That's the danger in editorial decisions.

Re: Our disappearing web

Yert — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 02:27:56 -0000

We record so much.
Increasingly always connected.
The Internet is part of the brain.
It hurts to forget.
Real men don't let the world just mirror.
Will time wash away all things as it has?
Real men do more...
Can I save it all?
Should I save it all?
Will I remember?

Our legacy is not secured but through the interaction. Is the Internet assured? Is the world's finest interaction able to sustain us for the future?

Re: Our disappearing web

Public Relations — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 21:39:13 -0000

The Google archived indexes offer a unique opportunity to discover who were the first to use NOW POPULAR terms - like Web 2.0 or Web services or SEO etc.

It will be intriguing to see what ultimately happened to those early innovators - by comparing their status now.

Re: Our disappearing web

aiusepsi — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 21:14:02 -0000

What's sad is that even knowledge and creativity worth preserving may still be lost.

We will never be able to read the entirety of Aeschylus' "Prometheus Unbound" apart from a few fragments that have survived, quoted by other authors; or read any but a few of books of Livy's history of Rome.

I think thet's one reason the information on the web is more subject to be lost than many other forms of information. The oldest books we have survived because they were copied out, over and over and over; people thought they were worth preserving, so we can still read words written by Julius Caesar, or Homer's Illiad, etc. stuff that's genuinely thousands of years old.

On the web we hardly ever copy, we just link. There's not enough redundancy in our data. Makes it fragile and easy to lose.

Then there's format problems, both file formats and storage media problems, and the sheer space required to keep everything. It's very likely that a good proportion of the stuff on the web will be lost. Of course, a lot of it isn't worth preserving.

Re: Our disappearing web

Akshay Kapur — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:02:04 -0000

Here's one thing that will, Story Corps from NPR: http://www.npr.org/template...

I recorded a conversation with story corps a few months back and it was a wonderful experience. I was given a free cd of the conversation and it will be archived on the LOC servers. That should hopefully bar any impending natural disasters from wiping historical information out!

Re: Our disappearing web

Dan Dawson — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:15:23 -0000

I *love* Archive.org but I sure wish they hadn't deleted the entire history of http://mounthermon.org which I've managed since 1997. Apparently if someone asks them not to archive a site and to delete the history, they do it... and they claim there is no bringing back that which was deleted. Wish I could have had some input, and wonder who asked them to delete my site from their history?

Re: Our disappearing web

Parish — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 15:27:46 -0000

I wish everything could be saved. Say 100 years from now with all this data saved we would be able to build some incredible social studies with advanced search algorithms. Say like... Yearly word clouds for the entire internet. That would be incredible from a historical view.

Re: Our disappearing web

TheDoc — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:27:03 -0000

"I seriously doubt these words will survive 100 years."

They shouldn't. Seriously, I don't mean that as a dig, but given the ease with which people generate content, it's a great thing that it's not all chiseled onto stone. The problem we have nowadays is not saving content, but deciding what should be saved.

Re: Our disappearing web

Paul R. — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:15:03 -0000

How topical, given that this year's iPRES conference took place in London earlier this week:

http://www.bl.uk/ipres2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/c...