Web Heritage Could Be Lost 128
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."
Sadness (Score:5, Interesting)
I really miss the Internet of the mid-90's...back when Netscape was king, an animated .gif was exciting, and Vivo Video [wikipedia.org] 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::
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You obviously don't remember "Hamster dance". Charm, indeed!
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it was cute! and by the way the hamster lives
http://www.hampsterdance.com/classics/originaldance.htm [hampsterdance.com]
Really? (Score:3)
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.
Re:Sadness (Score:4, Funny)
You obviously don't remember "Hamster dance". Charm, indeed!
What about the Jesus dance [angelfire.com]? Copying that onto the school's website in 1999 got me banned from using the computers for the rest of the week!
(Although, it took about 6 months for someone to notice, care and complain.)
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX-_mSBHDTE != hamster dance. check the replies to the GP
Re:Sadness (Score:5, Funny)
Bah. I really miss the Internet of the mid-80s, when telnet was king, a UUCP connection was exciting, and animated ASCII was used for streaming.
(waiting for a 70s guy to show up)
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Re:Sadness (Score:4, Informative)
Sadly, no, we actually did code animated ASCII by hand for display on terminals (or terminal windows). It was awful... especially at 300 baud, though even at 1200.
Re:Sadness (Score:5, Funny)
Humbug, I really miss the Internet of the mid-70's, where line-printer keyboards were king, a computer with a monitor was exciting, and ASCII art printouts were used for decorating the office.
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where line-printer keyboards were king
Damn straight. The LA36 DECwriter [slashdot.org] rocked!
Pissed off the computer teacher by playing "startrek" for 3 hours on that terminal. Burned off most of a box of paper. But I did kill a lot of Klingons and saved the Federation many times, so it was worth it.
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That is worthy of a motivational poster...
"Should we warp drive now or go two sectors down and attack the Klingons"
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I really miss the 70s when college essays were hand written and talking to an actual person was exciting and you went to the theater to see animation. And thank god no one cared to archive more than a few random photos.
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They were, but that didn't prevent some asshole from nicking my ASCII rendering of the Mona Lisa on 11x14 inch fanfold that I had on the wall of my machine-room in 1976...
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I miss bulletin board systems (BBS) days. :(
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The 90s were a unique time for web culture.
A consultation for us who missed the 60s, with its promiscuous sex and hippy strength LSD; you can tell your kids about dancing baby, squealing 56k modems, Usenet flame wars, and reinstalling Windows 95 with active desktop 5 times per day.
Ahh good times.
consolation (Score:2)
Damn you spell checker, damn you.
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That's all true, and it shows the internet sucked back then. I used Linux back then so no reinstalling, but really, there wasn't much information on the Web that was useful for non-scientists back then, and after seeing two websites of proud owners who wanted everyone to see their home address, telephone number and email address in the ugliest fonts and colors they could find you had enough. Luckily, Slashdot existed even in those dark times.
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Actually, that's only partly true. Project Gutenberg had a head-start (I think from 1971) on the internet. That and lots of other material was available via UUCP and various BBS sites.
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You knew a system was infected the moment you saw active desktop enabled.
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Not entirely...far less viruses and spyware, spam wasn't as big of a deal, drive-by browser hijacking was far less common...besides, I would take a blinking marquee of text over pop-ups and banners any day.
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The nostalgia back in the day was far better than your nostalgia.
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Why is everyone so worried? Just do the following:
cvs co -r 1.1 internet
Or if that doesn't work
cvs co -r 1.1 www
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I really miss the Internet of the mid-90's...back when Netscape was king, an animated .gif was exciting, and Vivo Video [wikipedia.org] 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::
There was no charm, its all nostalgia (yearning for the past in an idealized form.) It happens everywhere, but I see it a lot with MMOs where people keep calling uppon the charm of the old EverQuest or the old Ultima Online, etc.
15 years from now, today's teenagers will say just what you are saying now about the days when Facebook, Tweeter, Youtube and Google were the main internet hits and cumbersome Flash plugins were required to see dynamic content.
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>>>Netscape was king, an animated .gif was exciting, and Vivo Video was used for streaming
Also it was still possible to be online with a dialup modem. Have Web developers completely-and-totally forgotten the lessons of the 90s? (Compress images using GIFwizard, don't buffer audio unless the user first clicks "load" or "play", and don't use megabyte-sized movies when a 100K animated GIF will do.)
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That's a good point...unless you disable nearly everything, I don't see how dial-up users could still even use the Internet today.
Then again, considering it is 2010, no one in the USA should still be subjected to dial-up, but that's a different conversation -_-;;
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When I'm on dialup with my laptop, I use image compression (to squash the GIFs/JPGs the developers failed to do right the first time). Also flash compression and ad blocker. And even then, if I go to a site like IMDb.com, I can expect a 5 minute download. I can't imagine trying to do straight dialup without Netscape's or Opera's web acceleration.
Developers should be trying to make their pages smaller, if not for dialup, then for people using Wireless or Cellular connections. There's simply no acceptabl
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"but there was a certain charm that just isn't present on today's Internet. ::sigh::"
The charm came from the fact that nerds mostly populated the early web since most people were not savvy enough to use the internet beyond it's most basic level for email, chat and games.
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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 spe
why? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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It's "heritage," which means "whatever happened in the past, for whatever reason, we are obligated to point out and say 'we came from here,' even if only so we can say 'look how far we've come.' "
You must be one of those people who doesn't understand reconstructions of old-fashioned rooms in museum exhibits. It's an anthropological thing.
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Nonsense, I actually love museums and history in general. What is so great about history is the signal to noise ratio is much higher than the present. Not every single bit of information is really worth the effort to save, and if we try to then we'll just be left with an unweildly ammount of information that nobody will ever bother accessing.
Re:why? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what you might think now, but a historian of the future would probably disagree. By way of an example, it's possible to gain an insight into practices of the past by looking into details of regulations: few official records exist, for instance, detailing fraudulent practice in the food industry in 16th or 17th century England, but the fact that there are statutes specifically forbidding stuffing meat with rags to make it look "plumper" tell us a lot about common practice of the time.
History isn't just made up of dates and battles. It is made up of countless little bits, each not in itself very important, but contributing to the whole.
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Which signal to noise ratio? If you read history books, what you're getting is somebody's story about how things happened and what things were like. They got that information by going through a whole lot of noise, or by referring to somebody else who went through all the noise. You will also read people coming to conclusions that differ, because they went through all the crap and came up with different conclusio
Loss of Geocities, and why it didn't make sense (Score:2)
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
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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?
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And why should the internet be somehow exempt?
If it is something illegal/incriminating, you were ill-advised to put it in a publically available place.
Re:why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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So? Nobody's going to care about Obama's election campaign 50 years from now, just like nobody cares about FDR's election campaign - other than the fact "he won" and he promised "change" from the Hoover's failed policies.
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I suppose if you believe everyone on Earth is a moron who does stupid things and never accomplishes anything, than I guess you would naturally be drawn to the conclusion that history is basically pointless. Ford said "History is Bunk" for just this reason.
On the other hand, a lot of people like to go around claiming that FDR ran on a socialist platform -- this is important because if he actually enacted socialist policies, it would imply these were disclosed and popularly accepted by a large part of the po
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And, armed with all this information you have what exactly?
A means for fiery debate to continue over decades-old topics with still no consensus, no conformist view?
Don't get me wrong... I believe history and historical perspective have a place. It's just that your argument does not carry the water for this debate.
And I have a hard time rationalizing why on earth anyone 50 years from now, doing any real, substantive work, would care what /. looked like on July 15th, 2009.
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They do that anyway...
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However that doesn't mean that it should be a primary goal of our culture to preserve the mundane details of our lives in th
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I wasn't aware that the British Museum was proposing that the their archive was to become the "primary goal of our culture."
The shopping lists of medieval farmers is very important, particularly to economists who try to build a consistent timeline of income growth and proportional spending. This has a lot of implications on modern policy... after all, if a medieval peasant spent less than 10% of his income on shelter, and a modern American spends over 30%, why is that, and maybe are we doing something wron
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Oh wait, different Middle Ages. So sorry.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canticle_for_Leibowitz [wikipedia.org])
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Wherever people gather, there needs to be a chronicle, otherwise some authority in the future is going to make some arbitrary guess about what people believed or wanted.
And?
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I was posting photos taken at events run by an organization where I was a volunteer for 16 years. I couldn't remember the name of the bands in a couple of the photos, so I went back to the web site. Only, the new management had completely deleted all the detailed band information!
It wasn't captured in the Wayback machine either.
That is why I would support an archive, but given how sites are built today, that may be difficult to do.
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Should have dumped the information to paper. Paper has permanence, and can be stored away, and even when damaged is still readable.
*
* Or even better a stone tablet (one of those new laser printers that carve stone).
Re:why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Anything of significance will either stick around, or be archived by others who find it significant.
The problem is that you can only evaluate the historic value of something years or decades after it happened. That's why plenty of movies and early TV shows got lost or even destroyed. Even the original moon landing footage is gone. All that stuff just wasn't considered valuable enough and the self space or the reusable magnetic tape was considered more important than the data contained in them.
Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it and we seem to be doing exactly that when it comes to archiving the Internet.
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history is always distorted and often fabricated, and the ramblings of millions of manipulated ignoramuses won't help the matter
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mod parent up for the amusing use of language. +1, Language use.
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or -1 old fart talk. being near half-century old makes for quaint if not archaic phrasings.
Re:why? (Score:5, Insightful)
The funny thing, what we consider junk today sometimes - mind you, only sometimes - turns out to be really interesting a few generations down the line.
Case in point, advertising leaflets from the early part of the 20th century were undoubtedly not held in high regard at the time. Today however researchers regard them as a useful source of information that was not captured in other media at the time, usually because it was something "everyone knew".
The point is that we are ill equipped today to judge what will be "valuable" tomorrow.
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Yeah but researchers think even a small snippet of paper that says "I played with my dollie today" and buried under a log cabin is useful. They are a little bit...... strange.
I don't think we should be allowing researchers to decide what to preserve, otherwise we'd all drown under a mountain of preserved junk. I know if I saved everything I ever made, including every homework or every art class creation, I'd need at least three houses just to store it.
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Yeah but researchers think even a small snippet of paper that says "I played with my dollie today" and buried under a log cabin is useful. They are a little bit...... strange.
Ahh, so from that snippet of paper we can see that some child was old enough to write and their favourite toy was a dollie since they found that significant enough to commit to paper. Not only that but that child had literacy and access to a pen and to paper. Also, since gender stereotyping is pretty strong, we can probably also assume that that child was a girl which may also be significant since education wasn't considered the province of girls in many societies for a long time. So, yes, there may be "
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Why in the world would anyone in the future care about a website that barely even stuck around for a month.
Many of those sites are marketing tools or similar, and plenty of people are interested in old advertising posters etc.
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However, what's stopping everyone from just saving all of their content on their computers before their site dies? Sure, I guess some sites have a lot of content, but massive hard drives are available. Am I missing something?
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How is that different from the typical myspace page? except that its mp3 instead of midi and horrors of flash and javascript instead of activex.
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Go check out an archive from the mid-90s. Under construction sign, with the digging stick figure and roadway blocker. Repeating image on the background. Dancing hamster.
How is that different from the typical myspace page?
The worst thing about 90s backgrounds was the *non-scrolling* repeating image. I always hated them, but I thought they'd died at the turn of the millennium along with their natural home, Geocities.
Odd that you should mention MySpace- the Geocities for the new (er, now past) decade- because I was unpleasantly surprised to see them reappearing there years after I thought they'd sunk without trace, but way too early for an "ironic" 1990s revival. (Yuk.)
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You just found out about MySpace?
Way Back When (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I couldn't afford to pay the hosting charges (between jobs) and it died.
On the other hand, I'm quite glad that the majority of the geocities stuff isn't there, it was mostly awful.
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I don't know about now, but back then if your site didn't have a URL of its own it never showed up at all, which is why Harriot's wasn't there. Mine was hosted by my ISP at first, but I moved all the content to my domain after I bought it, while Yello There was hosted on someone else's domain. Most of my old site is still available via the wayback machine.
And Yello There was a pretty popular site at the time, considering how few folks were even on the internet then.
The geocities sites weren't the only bad o
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www.worlddatabase.com
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After I tired of my site and let it lapse, someone bought it and it became a porn site.
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Goatse is a geek favorite? A better "geek favorite" would be the somethingawful photo of George Bush with a laptop on his desk displaying goatse. That at least was funny.
Most Websites Should Be Lost To The Ages (Score:3, Insightful)
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I don't think it is bad design that is in question, but content.
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I don't think it is bad design that is in question, but content.
Duly noted. Though most content isn't much better than the sites themselves.
... what am I saying? They already do. Those places are like pictures documenting the nights of bad drinking ... and they're primed to be blackmail fodder 'til the end of time.
I wonder why they aren't trying to get Facebook, MySpace, et al, to permanently archive everything ever posted there for historical purposes
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Does the UK really want to be remembered for their craptacular websites? [...] most websites are like a night of bad drinking.
Bad drinking is an important part of British culture, TYVM.
67.4% of all statistics are made up.... (Score:2)
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And 99% of all websites are boring, useless, commercial, or self-serving. Let them die...tomorrow would be too soon.
What's interesting to us will not necessarily be the same as what's interesting to future historians. Internet culture is problematic as it doesn't really leave a any persistent trail.
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Predicting which 1% will be valuable to historians of the future *is* predicting the future. And we all know how accurately people can predict the future.
-messege sent from my VR sunglasses in my flying car.
Does this matter at all (Score:1)
Relocate (Score:1, Funny)
The British Library should declare independence.
Sounds like a job for Google (Score:2, Interesting)
On this subject... (Score:2)
Via the Wayback Machine, appropriately enough, James Gleick offers this [archive.org].
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Incidentally his web site now has a portrait which is, to quote its properties 2102px × 2871px (scaled to 150px × 200px). What happened, James? You used to be cool.
Those who control... (Score:2)
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.
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I'm sorry Mr. Coward, but you clearly lack the power to control that famous quote.
Culture is like yogurt... (Score:3, Interesting)
"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 will the Brits panic about next? (Score:2)
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Well Chicken Little did have a British accent...
I assume you're talking about the animated film. He probably had a "British" accent (*) because it projected some appropriate stereotype for the Yank filmmakers or their presumed audience.
(*) I notice that only Americans call them "British" accents, and those usually refer to their stereotyped view of how upper-class English people talk- and of course, all British people are upper-class with butlers and thatched roofs and all that crap.
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Offtopic national ramblings... (Score:2)
(Then again, there are plenty of British actors who'll whore and U
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I've been to Scotland. Edinburgh at least. I thought it was great there, though a little too cold for my tastes. I went to the park near the train station (I forget its name) and all of the locals were enjoying a nice sunny day in May and I (grew up in California) was freezing.
I still think you're being a little too sensitive though. Despite what you see in Hollywood, most Americans love the various accents used in the UK and are perhaps a bit jealous that they don't speak that way themselves.
What rea
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I still think you're being a little too sensitive though.
Probably, yeah. :-)
I still think you're being a little too sensitive though. Despite what you see in Hollywood, most Americans love the various accents used in the UK and are perhaps a bit jealous that they don't speak that way themselves.
Possibly true, but I suspect that the majority of Americans- not just the Anglophiles- see the "upperclass with butler" stereotype as more representative than it actually is, even if they're aware it's slightly stereotypical. Which was why I cynically suggested playing on those preconceptions with my "authentic English house" experience. ;-)
I've been to Scotland. Edinburgh at least. I thought it was great there, though a little too cold for my tastes.
I guess if you live in California, Scotland is cold. I don't mind cold so much as rain and overcast weather- and Edinburgh, being on the east coast, d
Not all of it is worth saving. (Score:2)
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 th
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I'm sure noone in the mid 19th century would have considered the gardening notes of some priest at a monestary in Brno would be something to hang onto.
I Don't miss the 90's (Score:2)
We have nothing better to worry about. (Score:1)
NPLZ. Why was this posted?
What's a webpage? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
I remember those days (Score:2)
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?
PLATO (Score:2)
I miss PLATO [wikipedia.org]. 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!
TV Show (Score:2)
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.....