This sixteen year old cool URI has not changed. I think this idea of domains entering an archive state is worth pursuing.
Also, I love the science fictional footnote “Note for readers after 2100”.
For many archivists, alarm bells are ringing. Across the world, they are scraping up defunct websites or at-risk data collections to save as much of our digital lives as possible. Others are working on ways to store that data in formats that will last hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years.
I love this timeline of internet firsts. Best of all:
You may touch the artifacts
The websites on display work—even the ones that used Flash!
Go spelunking down the archives to find some lovely graphic design artefacts.
Kevin takes my eleven-year old remark literally and points out at least you can emulate LaserDiscs:
So LaserDiscs aren’t the worst things to archive, networks of servers running code that isn’t available or archivable are, and we are building a lot more of those these days, whether on the web or in apps.
This is like the Gashlycrumb Tinies but for websites:
It’s been interesting to see how websites die — from domain parking pages to timeouts to blank pages to outdated TLS cipher errors, there are a multitude of different ways.
Making a copy of a web page which is a copy of a newsgroup post by Iain M Banks. 1994::2001::2021
Hyperlinks are the things with feathers.
Preserving the habitual, the banal.
219,000 hours of wonder.
Matt has accepted the challenge I threw down in my Webstock talk (which has now been transcribed).