|
Thursday, 17 June 2010 |
In at least one respect, the future is going to be ugly. Someday, the young people prone to posting the obscene and obnoxious on their Facebook pages are going to be running the country. A few may even seek elected office. Today, the campaign season is negative and nasty enough to turn off pretty much everyone with functioning brain cells. Can you imagine what it will be like a decade  or so from now when those youthful indiscretions come out in campaign advertising? How about when those same young people, now more mature and educated, sit down for interviews for high paying jobs in major corporations? I can see it now, the corporate interviewer asking the young hopeful to explain why in 2010 they wrote “Yo, my boss is a dumb[bleep]. I [bleeping] hate his [bleep]. Ur ma friends tho so I can tell u the truth.”
Yeah, good luck with the job.
It is an oft-repeated sentiment that what you put on the Web stays on the Web. A few weeks ago, I told you about Openbook, a website that allows anyone to see the bizarre and obnoxious in their natural state through unsecured Facebook postings. But history on the Web involves far more than just Openbook. There is an organization dedicated to preserving it in all of it’s wonder, promise and nastiness. Welcome to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
The Wayback Machine is a very cool website dedicated to archiving the Web. Given the bazillion or so websites out there, that is no small feat. According to the organizers, the true number is over 150 billion websites. I would imagine that after a billion or so, most people would stop counting. The archive stretches back to 1996, the very early publicly accessible World Wide Web. Thanks to a donation from the Mellon Foundation, the Wayback Machine archived two billion sites in 2007 alone. It currently consists of two petabytes (yep, that’s a new one for me as well) of data and is growing by 20 terabytes a month. It contains more text than is in the Library of Congress.
The Wayback Machine is easy enough to use: simply type in the address of your favorite website, click on the “Take Me Back” button and you’ll be presented with what has been archived over the years. Clicking on one of the links will show you the website as it was on the moment it was cataloged. It provides a fascinating look into the not too distant (but oh so far away) past; as well as offering a glimpse of the rapid evolution of the Web as we know it today. Due to the ginormous size of the archive, keyword searching is not possible.
It is important to know that because of the size of the archive and the popularity of the site, searches may take some time to complete (tip: after you click on the “Take Me Back” button, go yell at the microwave to hurry up cooking your pizza rolls - the search should be complete before you return). For those of us who are less than discrete (OK, obnoxious), I don’t think a delay in searching will necessarily stop a future campaign competitor or employer from finding out that you were a moron in your youth. It might be best to keep that to yourself right here in the present.
The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is located at www.archive.org/web/web.php.
As a bonus and for added fun, click on the “Moving Images” tab near the top of the page. From there you can find all sorts of cool stuff including information from 1950 on how to be a teenager. Sure, now they tell us.
|
