G’day, Frumps.
(Sorry, for some unknown reason I’m feeling Australian today. Maybe it has to do with the fact that Sunday is “video” night at Casa Frumpa and I can’t get the image of Meryl Streep shrieking “a dingo ate my baby” out of my mind).
At any rate, I have something totally unrelated (and totally marvelous) to serve up to you today. I learned of this out of a fit of total exasperation with the Internet, last week. I was merrily trolling along in cyberspace looking for something very specific that I figured I had a “snowball’s” chance of finding. Lo and behold, Google offered up a link that had such a “long tail” that I figured I would save a good hour not having to follow a daisy chain of links to get at what I wanted. I cackled, clicked and . . . nada. Dead link. Link rot. Foiled again!
Now this old bird hopped on the Internet the day it opened for business. Had to – it was my job. So, in the relatively short time that the Internet has existed, I’ve seen the “good, the bad and the ugly” of its evolution. I know better than to expect too much of it. But, really, I was not in good humor over that dead link.
Since I was derailed anyway, I decided to cast about and find out if any eager young things were trying to do anything about this problem. I started with one of my favorite comfort zones – The Blog Herald (if you don’t know it, you really should check it out). It turned out that one of my favorite bloggers, Lorelle had written a post in February on this very topic.
It seems that Lorelle had been skunked far worse than I had. I lost about an hour, Lorelle lost two weeks that she had spent writing an article about a marvelous new web resource that had inexplicably gone “belly up” while she was working away at her article. Lorelle’s blog post on this unfortunate episode contains some very interesting statistics on “link rot” (that you should definitely check out, if you’re statistically inclined) but, more intriguing, her post also contained a comment and link to something called the Internet Archive – which, it turns out, is a truly remarkable treasure!
Here is how the Internet Archive describes its mission:
“The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.”
And, IA received a grant from the Mellon Foundation to create what they call “Around the World in 2 Billion Pages” in which Internet Archive completed a 2 billion page web crawl in 2007. This is the largest web crawl attempted by Internet Archive. The project was designed to take a global snapshot of the Web. Please browse through the resulting collection.
It’s worth noting that this cache contains far more than static web pages. IA currently offers: 178,740 videos, 64,926 live music concerts sorted by artist, 353,910 audio recordings, 1,426,267 texts and 33,659 items of software. The Software Archive is designed to preserve and provide access to all kinds of rare or difficult to find, legally downloadable software titles and background information on those titles. The collection includes a broad range of software related materials including shareware, freeware, video news releases about software titles, speed runs of actual software game play, previews and promos for software games, high-score and skill replays of various game genres, and the art of filmmaking with real-time computer game engines.
Another great feature is that there are rotating samples for each category called “Curator’s Choice” just to get you rolling.
I’m not going to run on much further about this except to say that, if you go, you must check out IA’s “Wayback Machine” which is the name of their internal search facility. One of the very interesting aspects of a search on IA is that, depending on how far back in time you go, you will see the look and feel of a very, very different Internet.
Enjoy, Frumps. And, G’day.
internet, internet archive dead links link rot blog herald blog struggles lorelle on wordpress
