[extropy-chat] The Digital Dark Age

Emlyn emlynoregan at gmail.com
Fri Sep 23 05:54:11 UTC 2005


On 23/09/05, kevinfreels.com <kevin at kevinfreels.com> wrote:
> I'm wouldn;t be too concerned with obselesence. Much of the data is crap.

true enough, but I think historian types make the point that they
would like to be able to decide that, rather than just losing stuff.

> There are many market forces working to preserve the information that is
> worth saving. A clay tablet may last thousands of years but language itself
> evolves and without something like the Rosetta Stone it's pretty worthless.
> As long as civilization itself doesn;t fall, all should be OK.

If it does, we'll have other things to worry about :-)

What I am
> more concerned with is the millions of "home pages" created in the last 10
> years that had useful information on them, but were eventually lost to ISP
> changes, lack of interest, forgetfulness, and many other things. How I wish
> I had the storage capacity 5-10 years ago to save everythign to a local file
> when I was online. (Then again, with dial-up who would take the time to do
> such a thing!)
>

Someone already did this for you...

http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

"Browse through 40 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few
months ago. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a
site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then
select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to
other archived pages at as close a date as possible. Keyword searching
is not currently supported."

--
Emlyn

http://emlynoregan.com   * blogs * music * software *



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