The Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is an amazing long running concept that aims to create an archive of all web pages at various points in time. The archive and a tool called the Way Back Machine allow you to see what a site looked like when it started and how it progressed as time passed by. This is fantastic fun. For example, check out google (I wonder if they knew they’d be billionaires in a few years) or early versions of microsoft.com. The archive itself consist of 2 petabytes (that’s 2 x 1024 X 1024 Gigabytes!) and is growing at 20 terabytes (20 x 1024 Gigabytes) a month. That is an amazing amount of data.
There is also a serious side to the Archive. Most people work hard (scammers, spammers and some affiliate markers excluded) to provide web pages that contain useful or informative material. It is sad to see this information disappear if the site is closed down. The Way Back Machine ensures that the material will live on forever. This is extremely important as Yahoo’s Geocities was shut down in October 2009. Geocities has been long running and as a result thousands of pages that used to exist are now no more. As many authors have now moved or passed on (check out the poetry from this author who passed at an youngish age and who inspired reocities – a dedicated Geocities archive) this information has not been replicated elsewhere and would now be lost forever if not for projects like the Internet Archive. I am an editor with the DMOZ project and have personally had to delete Geocities sites from the archive with no replacement. This is frustrating.
Finally, the Internet Archive can also be used as a source of inspiration. I look at sites that have been operational for a few years and gain tremendous inspiration from how poor they looked a couple of short years ago. It is important to remember that your sites will not be best in class from the onset.
