Never mind their recent data breach—the reason to avoid Quora is that it’s a data roach motel.
All of Quora’s efforts to lock up its community’s contributions make it incredibly difficult to preserve when that they go away, which they someday will. If you choose to contribute to Quora, they’re actively fighting to limit future access to your own work.
I quite like Phil’s idea of having charts like this. It might be a fun project for Homebrew Website Club to do something like this for my site.
Flickr is removing anything over 1,000 photos on accounts that are not “pro” (paid for) in 2019. We highlight large and amazing accounts that could use a gift to go pro. We take nominations and track when these accounts are saved.
A time capsule for the long now. Laser-etched ceramic tablets in an Austrian salt mine carry memories of our civilisation in three categories: news editorials, scientific works, and personal stories.
You can contribute a personal story, your favorite poem, or newspaper articles which describe our problems, visions or our daily life.
Tokens that mark the location of the site are also being distributed across the planet.
As it turns out, some sites are much harder to archive than others. This article goes through the process of archiving traditional web sites and shows how it falls short when confronted with the latest fashions in the single-page applications that are bloating the modern web.
This is very, very good news. Following on from the recent announcement that a huge swathe of Flickr photos would soon be deleted, there’s now an update: any photos that are Creative Commons licensed won’t be deleted after all. Phew!
I wonder if I can get a refund for that pro account I just bought last week to keep my Creative Commons licensed Flickr pictures online.
I’ve got a lot of photos on Flickr (even though I don’t use it directly much these days) and I’ve paid up for a pro account to protect those photos, but I’m very worried about this:
Beginning January 8, 2019, Free accounts will be limited to 1,000 photos and videos.
That in itself is fine, but any existing non-pro accounts with more than 1000 photos will have older photos deleted until the total comes down to 1000. This means that anyone linking to those photos (or embedding them in blog posts or articles) will have broken links and images.
Tears in the rain.
A profile of Mark Graham and the team at the Internet Archive.
Videos for the whole first season of James Burke’s brilliant Connections TV series.
Internet Archive and chill.
From smart dust and spimes, through to online journaling and social media, to machine learning, big data and digital preservation…
Is the archive where information goes to live forever, or where data goes to die?
Here’s a treasure trove of eighties nerd nostalgia:
In the 1980s, the BBC explored the world of computing in The Computer Literacy Project. They commissioned a home computer (the BBC Micro) and taught viewers how to program.
The Computer Literacy Project chronicled a decade of information technology and was a milestone in the history of computing in Britain, helping to inspire a generation of coders.
A fascinating treasure trove of objects recovered from the canals of Amsterdam.
I share many of these concerns.
The web is huge. Even bigger than Google. I love that the web preserves all the work. I don’t think anyone has the right to change the web so they no longer work.
A terrific piece by Maria Bustillos on digital preservation and the power of archives, backed up with frightening real-world examples.
Because history is a fight we’re having every day. We’re battling to make the truth first by living it, and then by recording and sharing it, and finally, crucially, by preserving it. Without an archive, there is no history.
Russell Davies:
That’s the web I want; a place with spare corners where un-monetisable enthusiasms can be preserved, even if they’ve not been updated for seven years.
Off-site backups of humanity’s knowledge and culture, stored in different media (including pyramidal crystals) placed in near-Earth orbit, the moon, and Mars.
We are developing specialized next-generation devices that we call Archs™ (pronounced “Arks”), which are designed to hold and transmit large amounts of data over long periods of time in extreme environments, including outer space and on the surfaces of other planetary bodies.
Our goal is to collect and curate important data sets and to install them on Archs™ that will be delivered to as many locations as possible for safekeeping.
To increase the chances that Archs™ will be found in the future, we aim for durability and massive redundancy across a broad diversity of locations and materials – a strategy that nature itself has successfully employed.
It’s a shame that this archiving project is coming to end. We don’t always know the future value of the present:
Researchers have come to realize that the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, transcriptions from London’s central criminal court, are the only record we have of the spoken words of many people who lived centuries ago but were not in the educated or elite classes. That we have them talking about the theft of a pig rather than the thought of Aristotle only gives us greater insight into the lived experience of their time.
We asked you to tell us what you’d put on a new Golden Record. Here’s what you chose.
Ever thought about what you’d put on the Voyager golden record? Well, what are you waiting for? Your website can be your time capsule.
A three-part series on digital preservation:
You can’t log into the same Facebook twice.
The world as we experience it seems to be growing more opaque. More of life now takes place on digital platforms that are different for everyone, closed to inspection, and massively technically complex. What we don’t know now about our current experience will resound through time in historians of the future knowing less, too. Maybe this era will be a new dark age, as resistant to analysis then as it has become now.