Adactio: Links

Posthaven is the safe place for all your posts forever

This is a breath of fresh air: a blogging platform that promises to keep its URLs online in perpetuity.

On Thingpunk

Perhaps we are fetishising physical things because our digital creations are social media junk food:

It’s easy to fetishize Brutalist buildings when you don’t have to live in them. On the other hand, when the same Brutalist style is translated into the digital spaces we daily inhabit, it becomes a source of endless whinging. Facebook, for example, is Brutalist social media. It reproduces much the same relationship with its users as the Riis Houses and their ilk do with their residents: focusing on control and integration into the high-level planning scheme rather than individual life and the “ballet of a good blog comment thread”, to paraphrase Jane Jacobs.

The First Website by Mark Boulton

Mark writes about his work with CERN to help restore the first website to its original URL.

I have two young children and I want them to experience the early web and understand how it came to be. To understand that the early web wasn’t that rudimentary but incredibly advanced in many ways.

Internet Archive on Vimeo

A beautiful short film on the amazing work being done at the Internet Archive, produced on the occasion of their 10 petabyte celebration.

Truly awe-inspiring.

Brewster’s trillions: Internet Archive strives to keep web history alive

A profile in The Guardian of the Internet Archive and my hero, Brewster Kahle (who also pops up in the comments).

The Death of Upcoming.org - Waxy.org

Heartbreaking and angry-making.

Fictive Kin, The Joke’s On Us?

The story of one site’s disgraceful handling of acquisition and shutdown (Punchfork, acquired by Pinterest) and how its owner actively tried to block efforts to preserve user’s data.

A collection of those appalling doublespeek announcements that sites and services give when they get acquired. You know the ones: they begin with “We’re excited to announce…” and end with people’s data being flushed down the toilet.

Ideas of March — All in the head

A wonderful rallying cry from Drew.

The problem:

Ever since the halcyon days of Web 2.0, we’ve been netting our butterflies and pinning them to someone else’s board.

The solution:

Hope that what you’ve created never has to die. Make sure that if something has to die, it’s you that makes that decision. Own your own data, friends, and keep it safe.

They Keep Using That Word ∙ An A List Apart Column

David gets physidigital.

Dark Archives in Contents Magazine

A really lovely piece on the repositories of information that aren’t catalogued—a fourth quadrant in the Rumsfeldian taxonomy, these dark archives are the unknown knowns.

Control your own content

Honestly, if you value the content you create and put online, then you need to be in control of your own stuff.

Focusing on our future — some changes to our product line-up

What an Orwellian title for a blog post announcing the wholesale destruction of user’s content. Oh, Yahoo, you sound so proud of your cavalier attitude towards the collective culture that you have harvested.

Vile fuckwits.

Owning your own words – is it important?

A fascinating discussion on sharecropping vs. homesteading. Josh Miller from Branch freely admits that he’s only ever known a web where your content is held by somone else. Gina Trapani’s response is spot-on:

For me, publishing on a platform I have some ownership and control over is a matter of future-proofing my work. If I’m going to spend time making something I really care about on the web—even if it’s a tweet, brevity doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful—I don’t want to do it somewhere that will make it inaccessible after a certain amount of time, or somewhere that might go away, get acquired, or change unrecognizably.

When you get old and your memory is long and you lose parents and start having kids, you value your own and others’ personal archive much more.

Song blogging: Files That Last

I hereby declare that this song is my official anthem.

I want some files that last, data that will not stray.

Files just as fresh tomorrow as they were yesterday.

Interstellar Hard Drive - The Morning News

Investigating the options for off-world backups.

Data is only as safe as the planet it sits on. It only takes one rock, not too big, not moving that fast, to hit the Earth at a certain angle and: WHAM! Most living species are done for.

How the hell is your Twitter archive supposed to survive that?

www-talk

Here’s a treasure trove of web history: an archive of the www-talk list dating back to 1991. Watch as HTML gets hammered out by a small group of early implementors: Tim Berners-Lee, Dave Raggett, Marc Andreessen, Dan Connolly…

The Subcompact Publishing Reader - Readlists

A nice Readlist based on that excellent article by Craig on digital publishing:

This reader is made up of Craigmod’s essay “Subcompact Publishing” and essays linked to in the footnotes.

Subcompact Publishing — by Craig Mod

Very smart thinking from Craig about digital publishing.

Just Solve the Problem Month 2012: Nitty Gritty « ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason goes into detail describing the File Format problem that he and others are going to tackle in the effort known as Just Solve The Problem.

Migrating from Kindle to iBooks - zacwe.st

A step-by-step guide to unDRMing your Kindle books—a prudent course of action given Amazon’s recent unilateral wiping of Kindles.

The Charge of the Scan Brigade « ASCII by Jason Scott

Live in or near San Francisco? Interested in preserving computer history? Then you should meet up with Jason this Friday:

This Friday, October 5th, the Internet Archive has an open lunch where there’s tours of the place, including the scanning room, and people get up and talk about what they’re up to. The Internet Archive is at 300 Funston Street. I’m here all week and into next.

Eric’s Archived Thoughts: The Web Behind

This ticks all my boxes: a podcast by Eric and Jen about the history of the web. I can’t wait for this to start!

Brighton: South by South East?

Honor compares next week in Brighton to Austin in March.

Special Report #1: Data Protection — Contents Magazine

This is an important subject (and one very close to my heart) so I’m very glad to see these data protection guidelines nailed to the wall of the web over at Contents Magazine.

Treat our data like it matters.
No upload without download.
If you close a system, support data rescue.

Scripting News: How future-safe was the first Harvard blogging site?

A cautionary tale from Dave Winer of not considering digital preservation from the outside. We must learn the past. We must.

oldtweets - Laughing Meme

Kellan explains the tech behind Old Tweets …and also the thinking behind it:

I think our history is what makes us human, and the push to ephemerality and disposability “as a feature” is misguided. And a key piece of our personal histories is becoming “the story we want to remember”, aka what we’ve shared.

The Publication Standards Project

Like the Web Standards Project but for ePub. I approve of this message.

Digital archivists: technological custodians of human history | Ars Technica

An introduction to the important work of digital archivists:

Much like the family member that collects, organizes, and identifies old family photos to preserve one’s heritage, digital archivists seek to do the same for all mankind.

Form letter template for acquired startups — Gist

Just copy and paste.

Dear soon-to-be-former user…

1
2
3

Dear soon-to-be-former user,

We&#39;ve got some fantastic news!  Well, it&#39;s great news for us anyway.  You, on

Coding Horror: Preserving The Internet… and Everything Else

A love letter to the Internet Archive.

» Long Bets Bet – How Durable Are URLs? - Blog of the Long Now

The Long Now blog is featuring the bet between myself and Matt on URL longevity. Just being mentioned on that site gives me a warm glow.

ARCHIVE TEAM: A Distributed Preservation of Service Attack - YouTube

Jason’s rip-roaring presentation from Defcon last year.

Why I’m building Nilai by Colin Devroe

Now this is some prioritisation I can admire:

I’m going to build valuable, reliable, sustainable web services that will last forever.

What Goes Up, Doesn’t Have To Come Down

A thoughtful—and beautifully illustrated—piece by Geri on memory and digital preservation, prompted by the shut-down of Gowalla.

Webstock ‘12: Jeremy Keith - Of Time and the Network on Vimeo

The video of my talk from Webstock, all about wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff like networks and memory.

Jeremy Keith - All Our Yesterdays on Vimeo

The video of my presentation on digital preservation at last year’s Build conference.

Our communication methods have improved over time, from stone tablets, papyrus, and vellum through to the printing press and the World Wide Web. But while the web has democratised publishing, allowing anyone to share ideas with a global audience, it doesn’t appear to be the best medium for preserving our cultural resources: websites and documents disappear down the digital memory hole every day. This presentation will look at the scale of the problem and propose methods for tackling our collective data loss.

Where do Websites go to Die? « dpr-barcelona

Burying physical copies of dead websites in a Croatian cave.

Simon Collison | Colly | Journal | My digital preservation utopia

Colly’s thoughts on digital preservation are written in a lighthearted tongue-in-cheek way but at least he’s thinking about it. That alone gives me comfort.

We Are Historians | 1sixty

A beautiful reminder that by publishing on the web, we are all historians.

Every color you choose and line of code you write is a reflection of you; not just as a human being in this world, but as a human being in this time and place in human history. Inside each project is a record of the styles and fashions you value, the technological advancements being made in the industry, the tone of your voice, and even the social and economic trends around you.

Little Printer | BERG Cloud

This evolution of Tom Taylor’s microprinter looks like it’s going to be absolutely wonderful (and packed full of personality). Watch this space.

russell davies: again with the post digital

In a single post, Russell Davies manages to rehabilitate the term “post digital.” And he paints a vivid picture of where our “Geocities of things” is heading.

The Ruins of Dead Social Networks - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

Reminiscences of the BBSs of yesteryear that could in time be applied to the social networking sites of today.

Events - The Future of the Past of the Web | Digital Preservation Coalition

I’m going to try to make it along to this event in London next month.

Times Higher Education - Memory failure detected

A worrying report on the state of digital preservation and the web, specifically in the UK. Welcome to the memory hole.

History, our future - Preoccupations

A superb post by David that ties together multiple strands of personal digital preservation through homesteading instead of sharecropping.

Escaping the Digital Dark Age

Stewart Brand wrote this twelve years ago: it’s more relevant than ever in today’s cloud-worshipping climate.

I’d like to think that it’s ironic that I’m linking to The Wayback Machine because the original URL for this essay is dead. But it isn’t ironic, it’s horrific.

The Digital Storage of Analog Memories | Caseorganic Blog

Amber documents her attempt to turn physical objects imbued with meaning into digital artefacts.

Archives & Museum Informatics: Museums and the Web 2010: Papers: Cope, A.S., Buckets and Vessels

Here’s one to add to Instapaper or Readability to savour at your leisure: Aaron Straup Cope’s talk at Museums and the Web 2010:

This paper examines the act of association, the art of framing and the participatory nature of robots in creating artifacts and story-telling in projects like Flickr Galleries, the API-based Suggestify project (which provides the ability to suggest locations for other people’s photos) and the increasing number of bespoke (and often paper-based) curatorial productions.

Brighton Digital Festival

September in Brighton is going to be ker-razy! Here’s a nice responsive holding page listing just some of the events that will be going on …dConstruct, Maker Faire, Flash On The Beach and more.

Race to save digital art from the rapid pace of technological change | Technology | The Observer

Digital preservation in the art world.

LukeW | An Event Apart: All Our Yesterdays

Luke’s notes from my talk about long-term thinking and online preservation at An Event Apart in Boston.

FamilySearch Shares Plans to Digitize Billions of Records Stored at Granite Mountain Records Vault - LDS Newsroom

How the Mormon Church are storing and preserving genealogical data inside a mountain.

Digital legacy: The fate of your online soul - tech - 02 May 2011 - New Scientist

The editor of New Scientist writes about deletionists and preservationists while adding his own personal poignant perspective.

One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age | Digging through the Geocities Torrent

A blog devoted to sifting through the gems in the Geocities torrent. This is digital archeology.

Google can’t be trusted with our books | Simon Barron | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

The threat to Google Videos shows businesses are not suitable cultural custodians — they can’t be held accountable to the public.

Story Matters

Magazine creators share their experiences of going digital.

Geek Ninja Battle Night | Stuff and Nonsense

Andy hammers home the benefit of a long-term format like HTML compared to the brittle, fleeting shininess of an ephemeral platform-specific app.

A Memory of Webs Past - IEEE Spectrum

A detailed look at how French archivists go about preserving websites.

Digitale data in gevaar! - Datanews.be

If you speak Flemish, you might enjoy this article based on a chat I had with a Belgium journalist.

If you don’t speak Flemish, well, just move along.

James Bridle on Phare Conference on Vimeo

Everything is worth preserving and protecting.

Jeremy Keith on Phare Conference on Vimeo

I answered a few questions right after giving my talk at the Phare conference in Ghent.

Long Bets - The original URL for this prediction (www.longbets.org/601) will no longer be available in eleven years.

This is my prediction. If you think it’s wrong, challenge it. We shall then partake in a wager.

Safe-keeping - Preoccupations

I wish I had a teacher like David when I was in school.

URLs, permalinks, archives … preservation. It all matters so very much.

Swiss Fort Knox

This is the stuff James Bond stories are made of. Except in this case, the fortress exists to store data rather than criminal masterminds.

TIME CAPSULE ..::HOME::..

On 18 May 2010, the Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services) Project deposited a time capsule in the vaults of datacenter, Swiss Fort Knox, in Saanen, Switzerland. It contained the decoding information for five digital file formats on media ranging from paper, microfilm and floppy discs to CDs, DVDs and USB sticks.

Open Planets Foundation | digital, forever

This consortium of institutions and universities came together “to provide practical solutions and expertise in digital preservation.”

PLANETS stands for Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services.

Main Articles: ‘Domesday Redux: The rescue of the BBC Domesday Project videodiscs’, Ariadne Issue 36

The fascinating story of the BBC Domesday Project and its subsequent fate.

The purpose of the CAMiLEON project was to demonstrate the value of emulation in preserving not only the data stored in obsolete systems but the behaviour of the systems themselves - in this case one of the very first interactive multi-media systems. The aim was to reproduce the original user experience as accurately as possible, and the CAMiLEON team argued that the slight faults in images as displayed from the analogue discs were a part of that experience, and should not be cleaned up as Andy proposed to do. Our aim was different - we wanted to preserve the data with the highest quality available consistent with longevity.

Link Rot « The Bygone Bureau

Brilliant; just brilliant. Connor O’Brien remains skeptical about the abstract permanence of “the cloud.” The observations are sharp and the tone is spot-on.

If your only photo album is Facebook, ask yourself: since when did a gratis web service ever demonstrate giving a flying fuck about holding onto the past?

Pulling the plug on the BBC’s internet history « 853

The BBC’s decision to actively delete old content (rather than simply allowing it to take up some space on a server) really gets my blood boiling.

The BBC asked the public to contribute their memories of World War Two to a website between June 2003 and January 2006…” and five years later some suit decided to bin them.

Bletchley Park and History Hackday Request | Amplified

Let’s make the Bletchley Park data machine-readable so we can start mining the stories they contain (like Old Weather).

Bletchley Park need help to catalogue and create a proper archive of these decrypts.

I want in!

Outline of a Digital Preservation System (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought)

Aaron Swartz gets technical about online digital preservation.

We Didn’t Stop The Fire. – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report

Jeffrey points out another point of failure in our online storage: the willingness of site owners to sell their product (and your data) to a big company for a quick payout.

Forever / from a working library

Mandy writes about digital preservation:

The technological means to produce an archive are not beyond our skills; sadly, right now at least, the will to do so is insufficient.

Home - LOCKSS

Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe — a digital preservation initiative based at Stanford.

Cyberspace When You’re Dead - NYTimes.com

An accurately-downbeat look at digital preservation.

ASCII by Jason Scott / Yahoo!locaust

A viciously accurate assessment of Yahoo’s scorched earth policy towards our online collective culture:

All I can say, looking back, is that when history takes a look at the lives of Jerry Yang and David Filo, this is what it will probably say: Two graduate students, intrigued by a growing wealth of material on the Internet, built a huge fucking lobster trap, absorbed as much of human history and creativity as they could, and destroyed all of it.

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