Digital Archaeology Show Reveals 'Lost' Web Sites 113
Stoobalou writes "The world's first ever 'archaeological dig' of the internet is set to begin this week in London's über-trendy Shoreditch. The exhibition, entitled Digital Archaeology, kicks off today to mark the 20th anniversary of the first stirrings of the world wide web. According to its organisers, valuable evidence from the interweb's early days is at risk of being lost forever. Digital Archaeology is an attempt to kick-start a wider attempt to archive the web in Britain's first 'digital archive'."
Re:Perfect tool found for this project! (Score:2, Insightful)
Why were there requests for help in Spanish in a French speaking country?
Re:Prediction (Score:3, Insightful)
In fact, I think some people consider it to be a huge threat to the open internet when everyone's all cowered away tapping on their smartphones using apps rather than surfing using well-known protocols and standards. And those apps may or may not be using standard protocols. Segmenting the web away, slowly.
100% agree, it's very bad news, but I think if the iPhone/iPad were to lose popularity the trend would stop. Don't forget these apps were mostly made to work around the iPhone's crippled browsing experience. If another phone with a full-featured browser becomes the most popular (especially if it also has true multitasking with RSS reader widgets, etc) I think the "client app" trend will die off.
Re:Perfect tool found for this project! (Score:5, Insightful)
(50 years ago). Oh how I miss Radio. The modern-day television is basically commerce-oriented, while radio has devolved into a bunch of pop music.
(80 years ago). Oh how I miss Books. The modern-day radio is basically commerce-oriented, while books provided ad-free entertainment.
(100 years ago). Oh how I miss Live pianos/bands. The modern-day grammophone is basically commerce-oriented with actual talent on a steady decline - replaced with pop stars.
The problem with your analogy is that we still have radios, books, and live bands, but the internet we had ten and more years ago is long gone. It's all commercials now. Back in the nineties people were bitching about the few pages that had single banner ads.
Re:Perfect tool found for this project! (Score:4, Insightful)
>>>It's all commercials now.
As is typical with these kinds of statements ("all" "nothing left") it is false. It would be more accurate to say the web "almost" all gone, but there are still lots of websites that resemble the early web (no or few ads). There's even a few gopher sites around, and of course the pure-text Usenet which dates back to the 80s.
Re:Perfect tool found for this project! (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed. I also often think of the importance of anti-war college students in the US who were chatting directly with Serbian college students during that war, and the potential long-term importance of that.
While the crassly commercial applications of the Internet have grown exponentially, the projects for the commonweal that have been around since the beginning have steadily grown. It struck me that yesterday at work, I was listening to a presentation on a proprietary search engine; enterprise clients use it to store and index tens or hundreds of millions of documents. Wikipedia currently claims a bit under 3.5 million articles in English.
So, commercial enterprises are storing volumes of data that (apparently) dwarf Wikipedia. Yet how many people refer to Wikipedia daily? The steady, if slower, growth of a project such as Wikipedia has a much greater social impact than those larger, better-finance corporate enterprise projects.
Re:Perfect tool found for this project! (Score:3, Insightful)
the internet we had ten and more years ago is long gone
I got started on the Net a year before Eternal September, in 1992, and I used to think how terrible it was that the masses would "ruin" it. Yet every year the Net just keeps on getting better and better, because there's more and more information at my fingertips.