Internet Archive

Digital footsteps

November 7, 2008 by JD Lasica

If you’ve ventured onto the Net, your past may follow you in ways you’d never imagine

Our past now follows us as never before. For centuries, refugees sailed the Atlantic to start new lives. Easterners pulled up stakes and moved west to California. Today, reinvention and second chances come less easily. You may leave town, but your electronic shadow stays behind, as anyone who has ventured onto the Internet well knows.

We often view the Internet as a communication medium or an information-retrieval tool, but it’s also a powerful archiving medium that takes snapshots of our digital lives — and can store those fleeting images forever. [Read more…] about Digital footsteps

Summary of 2005 Citizens Media Summit

May 15, 2005 by JD Lasica

Given the rise of citizens’ media and the burgeoning grassroots publishing movement, author-technologist J.D. Lasica — with the encouragement of Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle — convened a Citizens Media Summit at the Internet Archive headquarters in San Francisco on May 14, 2005. The goal was to begin a conversation, make connections and set down a rough roadmap for how to nurture grassroots media in the years ahead.

Thirty-six people turned out for the strategy session on May 14, 2005, beginning at the Rob Hill campground in the Presidio before we retreated to the warmth of the Archive’s offices.

Attendees of the Summit

We were surprised by the robust turnout. People came not just from the Bay Area but from as far away as Boston, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis and Vancouver. Attending were: [Read more…] about Summary of 2005 Citizens Media Summit

The Net has forgotten how to forget

June 7, 1998 by JD Lasica

The digital attic has begun collecting and storing scraps of our lives — forever

This column appeared in the June 1998 issue of The American Journalism Review. For a more thorough look at this issue, see my article in Salon (with errant formatting given that they’ve switched publishing systems).

Gigabytes have been written about the digital revolution, but little attention has been paid to one of its most potentially profound social changes: The Internet doesn’t forget. Memories fade, but electronic archives are turning fleeting snapshots of our past lives into permanent records that may follow us forever.

And that has enormous consequences for us as communicators, journalists and citizens.

The common perception is that the Web is a fragile creature filled with dead links, “404 Not Found” error messages, hasty e-mails and other transient digital debris. Indeed, leading figures on the Net have bemoaned the wholesale loss of the Web’s early years, such as many of the political sites devoted to the ’96 election.

But efforts are under way to change all that. Brewster Kahle of San Francisco, inventor of several Internet search engines, is trying to collect, store and catalog the entire World Wide Web and all 33,000 Usenet newsgroups. Kahle’s nonprofit Internet Archive and more recent Alexa project are out to become the modern equivalent of the Library of Alexandria: the repository of all the world’s public digital information. To date he’s copied and stored some 8 trillion bytes of words, images and sounds (compared to 20 trillion in the Library of Congress). [Read more…] about The Net has forgotten how to forget

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