September 10, 2021

CNN: Some of the most iconic 9/11 news coverage is lost. Blame Adobe Flash

CNN: Some of the most iconic 9/11 news coverage is lost. Blame Adobe Flash. “Adobe ending support for Flash — its once ubiquitous multimedia content player — last year meant that some of the news coverage of the September 11th attacks and other major events from the early days of online journalism are no longer accessible. For example, The Washington Post and ABC News both have broken experiences within their September 11th coverage, viewable in the Internet Archive. CNN’s online coverage of September 11th also has been impacted by the end of Flash.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
August 16, 2021

The Conversation: The Internet Archive has been fighting for 25 years to keep what’s on the web from disappearing – and you can help

The Conversation: The Internet Archive has been fighting for 25 years to keep what’s on the web from disappearing – and you can help. “You may not realize portions of the internet are constantly disappearing. As librarians and archivists, we strengthen collective memory by preserving materials that document the cultural heritage of society, including on the web. You can help us save the internet, too, as a citizen archivist.”

Research & Opinion 0
August 16, 2021

MSNBC: What the elusive RNC statement on Afghanistan actually said

MSNBC: What the elusive RNC statement on Afghanistan actually said. “It’s important to emphasize at the outset that much of the RNC’s online archive has been removed, not just this single document. I went searching this morning for RNC press statements from 2020 regarding the COVID pandemic, the campaign, and Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation process. The links to all of the online statements from last year led to the same ‘404 error’ page. In other words, it appears the RNC scrubbed its online archive of effectively all pre-2021 statements, not just the press release about Trump and Afghanistan.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
August 16, 2021

ABC Future Tense (Australia): Link rot, pay walls and the perils of preservation

ABC Future Tense (Australia): Link rot, pay walls and the perils of preservation. “The cliché is that once something goes online, it’s up there forever. But the truth is that the Internet has a memory problem and some of what we’re losing – or could potentially lose – has significance and value. While archivists struggle with the challenge of preserving our digital record, the rise of pay walls present a particular problem.” This show will include participants from Internet Archive, Harvard Law School, and International Archives of Australia. I looked at a couple of previous shows and unfortunately did not see any evidence of captions.

Events 0
August 14, 2021

CogDogBlog: What the Olde Links Say About Domains

CogDogBlog: What the Olde Links Say About Domains. “Once again, my experience shows that if you publish something on an employer’s web site, or a company’s web site, or even in something that just takes away the work of managing web sites, the chances of it having a life to keep echoing is low. And if you are going to go to the trouble to craft something in writing, why put it in a place where the shelf life is short?”

Research & Opinion 0
July 23, 2021

BBC: The online data that’s being deleted

BBC: The online data that’s being deleted. “Thanks to the permanence of stone tablets, ancient books and messages carved into the very walls of buildings by our ancestors, there’s a bias in our culture towards assuming that the written word is by definition enduring. We quote remarks made centuries ago often because someone wrote them down – and kept the copies safe. But in digital form, the written word is little more than a projection of light onto a screen. As soon as the light goes out, it might not come back.”

Uncategorized 0
July 5, 2021

The Atlantic: The Internet Is Rotting

The Atlantic: The Internet Is Rotting. “This absence of central control, or even easy central monitoring, has long been celebrated as an instrument of grassroots democracy and freedom. It’s not trivial to censor a network as organic and decentralized as the internet. But more recently, these features have been understood to facilitate vectors for individual harassment and societal destabilization, with no easy gating points through which to remove or label malicious work not under the umbrellas of the major social-media platforms, or to quickly identify their sources. While both assessments have power to them, they each gloss over a key feature of the distributed web and internet: Their designs naturally create gaps of responsibility for maintaining valuable content that others rely on.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
June 24, 2021

Cointelegraph: Activists archive Hong Kong pro-democracy newspaper on blockchain

Cointelegraph: Activists archive Hong Kong pro-democracy newspaper on blockchain. “Hong Kong cyber-activists are not giving up on the freedom of speech and are backing up articles from the pro-democracy tabloid newspaper Apple Daily using blockchain technology. Following a national security probe, Apple Daily printed its last edition on Thursday. But Hong Kong activists took it from there and uploaded the publication’s articles on a distributed network, Reuters reported.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
June 18, 2021

Data Horde: How to recover your Yahoo! Groups from the Internet Archive

Data Horde: How to recover your Yahoo! Groups from the Internet Archive. “Yahoo! Groups, once upon a time a hub to many online communities, was shut down in 2020. Yahoo! Groups used to host mailing lists going as far back as 1997, and perhaps you may have once been a part of it yourself. Users were offered a Get Your Data tool to download their messages and other data, prior to the shutdown, but many people were unable to respond on short notice. Thankfully, owing to the efforts of the Save Yahoo Groups Project and Archive Team the data of many groups has been preserved. If you missed out on the GYD tool, you might still be able to retrieve your groups’ data by following the steps below.”

Useful Stuff 0
May 13, 2021

Discover: Meet The Activist Archivists Saving The Internet From The Digital Dustbin

Discover: Meet The Activist Archivists Saving The Internet From The Digital Dustbin. “Websites die constantly. The sheer size of the internet makes it feel like a permanent fixture, but individual pages only live an estimated 90 days before they change or vanish. At the same time, every single page has potential historical value. Maybe a future scholar will want to read a local news article that disappeared when the paper redesigned its website, or a political candidate is purging troublesome old statements. Perhaps someone will just want to revisit a video that made them laugh decades ago. That anything (and everything) might someday prove valuable is why extensive internet archiving efforts exist.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
May 3, 2021

The Standard (Hong Kong): RTHK plan to delete content spurs online push

The Standard (Hong Kong): RTHK plan to delete content spurs online push. “People online are discussing plans to back up [Radio Television Hong Kong] programs after the public broadcaster said it will delete content that is more than a year old from its YouTube and Facebook. They called on others to download their favorite RTHK programs and reupload them to another platform, with some even providing step-by-step tutorials teaching others how to download programs from YouTube.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
April 6, 2021

Analysis: 2,000 digital-only games will disappear when PlayStation closes its stores (Video Games Chronicle)

Video Games Chronicle: Analysis: 2,000 digital-only games will disappear when PlayStation closes its stores. “Although users will still be able to redownload their previous purchases for the foreseeable future, from July 2 it will no longer be possible to buy games on the PS3 or PSP online marketplaces, and come August 27 the same will apply to the Vita too. Of the games set to disappear from the formats, the vast majority are available on other platforms such as older PlayStation consoles or PC. However, around 138 games will essentially become lost forever once the stores close, our analysis suggests.”

Research & Opinion 0
April 5, 2021

The Verge: Yahoo Answers will be shut down forever on May 4th

The Verge: Yahoo Answers will be shut down forever on May 4th. “Yahoo Answers, one of the longest-running and most storied web Q&A platforms in the history of the internet, is shutting down on May 4th. That’s the day the Yahoo Answers website will start redirecting to the Yahoo homepage, and all of the platform’s archives will apparently cease to exist. The platform has been operating since 2005.”

Tweaks & Updates 0

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