Internet Archive Needs Donations, Has Matching Donor 58
The Internet Archive curates an astounding collection (actually, a collection of collections) of online resources, from historically significant to modern but obscure. Storing, serving and organizing more than 10 petabytes isn't cheap, despite their ongoing efforts to innovate on that front. An anonymous reader writes "An anonymous donor is matching $3 for every $1 given (up to $450,000) until December 31. One petabyte has been paid for so far and the archive is looking at getting three more. 'These massive servers are the backbone of the Archive, and critical to our continued growth. To all of you who've contributed to our fundraising drive, thanks from all of us here at the Internet Archive. '"
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Should we support them despite their unwillingness to keep records for websites which later-on put a robots.txt on their domain?
I can understand recently archived material being removed, but when someone buys a domain down the line and puts a robots.txt on their new site, it removes ALL OF THE PAST MATERIAL! And it seems that Archive.org tends to ignore the problem.
Re:Hey Google, do something! (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder where the national support is. They're basically doing the job of the Library of Congress, the British Library etc., in terms of being a record keeper of published material. You'd think those organisations (and there must be dozens and dozens of them throughout the world; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit [wikipedia.org]) could each chip in a few thousand dollars a year, wouldn't you?
Re:Minimum suggested level $25? (Score:2, Insightful)
$25/annum = 7 cents ($0.07) per day.
How much do you pay for your mobile data plan and/or ISP?
Re:Minimum suggested level $25? (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? Did you just call a guy who ACTUALLY donated a cheapskate?
Compare how often you use your mobile data plan and/or ISP to how often you use archive.org's services. I use my ISP every single day, for hours, and couldn't get a lot of my work done without them. I still gripe about how much I'm forced to pay them, too! By comparison, I've maybe looked for one site (which wasn't there) on archive.org in the last year or two.
They need $150,000 in donations. At BenJeremy's $5 level, they'd only need 30,000 donors. Just gonna guess his donation will come in well above the median for users of the site.