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Technodunci? Items older than 6 months zapped from Technorati. Opening for Brewster and libraries?
November 6, 2007 | 10:42 am
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By David Rothman
How ironic. What’s the Web but one huge database—used as such? The New York Times gets it, as shown by the unshackling of thousands of stories previously hidden behind a pay wall.
And yet some members of the supposed new media are stumbling in this area; they fail to grasp the importance of depth, permanence and/or trustworthiness.
Would you believe, the Technorati index has dropped items older than six months, including, ouch, TeleBlog-related ones? Although they might return, there’s no time given, according to a Techcrunch report. Richard Jalichandra, new Technorati CEO, should reverse course immediately.
Yes, you already know about the respective hassles of Beth Wellington and David Faucheux, whose blog-related efforts got dissed.
The library angle
If librarians are smart, they’ll team up with large research institutions and come up with archives and search engines—for the blogs, the Web, e-books, you name it—that are more trustworthy than commercial equivalents. Let’s also hope that the Internet Archive can get more serious about blog preservation.
Maybe it’s time for the archive and the library world—already collaborating on projects such as the Open Content Alliance—to grow much closer. And not just to counter Google for Power purposes. Look, aren’t libraries supposed to care about the long term? Perhaps they need to think about a Flickr-style service for easy storage of timely photos that in the future could be archival gems. Brewer and friends at the Archive ideally could receive the funds to provide the infrastructure. Hello, OCLC? Care to show a little more vision and less turf-fixation here
Related: Not that things are so great in the newspaper business.
Technorati Tags: Technorati , Internet Archive , OCLC , Brewster Kahle , Flickr , New York Times , NYT , OCA , Open Content Alliance , Beth Wellington , David Faucheux
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Comments:
Yes all libraries are working now towards printing out all blogs and posts and keeping them in an archive.
@Jeff … LOL.
Isn’t the bottom line here that Technorati’s found out there isn’t much of a business model behind their blog search engine, so this is an instantaneous way of saving money? Didn’t the Internet Archive have a similar issue for awhile (maybe it still does) where the Wayback Machine was like 6 months to a year out of date for most sites because of similar issues?
I’ve never used Technorati to actually search for anything except for the ego search variety. There’s this other search engine I use by default called Google…
Archives add a lot of bulk to the servers, increasing costs.
In a related loss of info, Scott Adams (Dilbert comic creator) occasionally blogs on the lack of free will in humans, us “moist robots” and those posts always draw huge numbers of comments (the Dilbert blog always seems to generate a couple hundred comments per post, but the free will posts go off the charts, 300, 400 as I recall). I was researching the topic and wanted to check Adams’s archives for links to scientific articles, when I found his archives only go back for a limited time.
A couple of weeks later he announced that he had taken his back archives offline because he’d gotten an offer by a publisher to put the posts and comments into a new book (now on sale).
This illustrates both the scary future scenario when all information is digital, and (if locked into copyrighted fortresses) capable of being changed or deleted with a few keystrokes — and the ugliness of the present/past when information was confined within the perishable pages of a few hundred (or just a few) p-books or scrolls.
Most of Sappho’s poetry, and Aristotle’s treatise on comedy along with much else, was lost via the latter; and nobody can even guess how much will be lost via the former.
[...] are up in smoke: it’s on TechCrunch, TechMeme and a bunch of blogs including hyku | blog, TeleRead, Susan Mernit’s Blog, Deep Jive Interests, Data Mining, WinExtra, Kevin Burton’s NEW [...]
“This illustrates both the scary future scenario when all information is digital, and (if locked into copyrighted fortresses) capable of being changed or deleted with a few keystrokes — and the ugliness of the present/past when information was confined within the perishable pages of a few hundred (or just a few) p-books or scrolls.”
Very interesting.
Several years ago I posted on my blog about a very blatant error at the BBC. People started calling me an idiot because when they went to the BBC story, the error wasn’t anywhere to be seen. The BBC had updated the story and their original error went down the memory hole (very unethical imo but that’s another story).
Since then I’ve used Slogger (http://www.kenschutte.com/slogger/) in Firefox to automatically make a local copy of every single web page I’ve visited. Compressed at the highest setting into daily zip files, its about 25gb per year of storage. Index with something like DTSearch (http://www.dtsearch.com/) and you pretty much never have that happen to you again.
Jeff and Brian: Heck, at least libraries could save the more important blogs as defined by the librarians. As for others, Brewster or someone like him could offer a subscription-based service. Meanwhile keep in mind that storage and bandwidth costs are declining. And no need to print out anything; well, unless the librarians see exceptions here! At any rate, at least blogs will be important in terms of culture, local history, you name it. Re Google: Private company. No telling what it might do or not do with the info in the future. It’s a corporation, not a philanthropy. Thanks. David
The Dilbert blog incident brings up a good question. How ethical (and perhaps legal) is it for someone like Adams to take all of those comments by others, restrict them and make a buck off of them? Did he inform his contributers beforehand that he might do this? Is he going to compensate those contributers with a portion of the sale of his book? Afterall, the comments of the contributers and the associated copyright belongs to the contributer, by default. Did Adams ask them to waive their copyrights by posting on his blog?