Idea Channel - Internet archive

[orangerful]

Ooooh this question gets my librarian sense tingling! Should we and can we archive The Internet? And (for me) the next question is how to we organize it so that people can FIND things within that archive.

My mind boggles just thinking about it! Hope I can fall asleep without visions of dead geocities page haunting me the rest of the night.

Comments

[poniesandphotos.livejournal.com]

Should we: yes.
Can we: I don't know how practical it is. Particularly for sites like twiter. I'm not a user so I'm not sure how they work but my understanding is that once you reach a limit they start deleting old tweets due to capacity issues. I feel like undertaking archiving everything would take a massive amount of data, and I don't see governments jumping on board to foot the bill for it.

[orangerful.livejournal.com]

Well, everything is getting bigger and it is costing less. I mean, remember back in the day when terabyte drives were reserved for uber-geeks? Now Flickr gives away a free terabyte to EVERY MEMBER. The problem that Mike hit upon was that while they can save the HTML for the site, if images are linked, those are lost. So that would be the really hard part. Someone needs a program that not only saves the tweets/blogs/website but also goes out to the links and saves the image file.

But, yeah, I don't see the government footing the entire bill but it feels like something should be done. Maybe just capturing moments on Twitter. Like when the vote was going on in Iran or during the Oscars when Ellen managed to crash the site. If they could save all the tweets from one day for a 5 minute period, I'm sure sociologists, linguists, and anthropologists of the future would have a field day with the text.

[geekslave.livejournal.com]

It's definitely an interesting idea, and probably should be done, but I don't see how it could practically be done.

Stacey

[orangerful.livejournal.com]

Exactly, considering how bad the searches are on sites like Twitter, it would take a LOT of time to find a way to catalog things and make them easy to find and give them relevance. But wouldn't it be great to at least save "historical" moments? Like tweets during elections or other huge events? Even 5 minutes worth of tweets (heck probably 5 seconds) would provide an array of things for historians to look at in the future, when Twitter is as dead as Geocities.

[geekslave.livejournal.com]

That would be really cool if at least important tweets could be archived.

Stacey

[impalalove]

Interesting idea, but one of the things that will no doubt come up is privacy.

And in addition, unless we find a better way, it'd also take up space.