If these personally-compiled-content websites are anihilated on some whim or other, financial or otherwise, we literally lose history. This entire Internet-mad era will be known as the time when humankind was essentially highly documented and also, mostly lost, as most of their product has been or will be or is being expunged for lack of space or money or interest. When you lose personal expression, regardless of how important you find individual utterances on individual ISPs, you lose history.

For people to proclaim “AOL is crap” or “why are people so naive as to think…” is missing the point. It’s history. Personal history. Important to someone, if not to you. Important to the ages, to get a clue as to how we were living and who we were. And it will be lost—all the stupid stuff and all the gold too, that is the essence of the human personality as it winds through its day and has opinions and points out interesting tidbits and sore spots and political weirdnesses.

Team Archive is a great idea, and a true humanitarian contribution. Thanks for this! You are thinking for all us on this one. (All of us still thinking about something beyond merely ourselves at this particular moment.)

*philosopher waves a libertarian (notice the lowercase “l”) flag

If my digital picture sharing website goes away I still have them too.

None of that makes me feel less for the folks who lost they’re painstakingly created digital scrapbooks or whatnot…

A long time ago I had all my digital photos on some pay-to-print service or other. The notified me they were shutting down, and were no longer able to send me the digital files back, but could accept orders for prints for a little longer. It gave me some short lead time, I ignored it because that was my “backup” and all my photos were “safe” on my laptop. Then my laptop ate them. Which made me very unhappy.

I had a backup of that laptop, but it didn’t help because the way in which my pictures were eaten left the thumbnails. So I had been making backups of the thumbnails, and at some point I the oldest backup was actually the only one that had the real pictures, and that went away.

Which is a great shame.

It is also a decent reminder to folks that think they “have it covered”. All it takes to screw you is for a few more things to fail at the right (excuse me, wrong) moment.

That said, if we make a set of laws about “digital evictions”, one had best hope that it explicitly defines who doesn’t have to participate, because most computer laws don’t, and sometimes have been a serious problem either to people who didn’t think it should apply to them, or to folks it shouldn’t apply to who have company lawyers that DO think it MIGHT apply.

You have to hope that when the law gets to the other side of the meat grinder we call congress that it doesn’t penalize folks that take decent (but not heroic) steps to keep your data backed up if the backup system fails.

You are also going to have to accept it will effect what new free or low cost services companies are willing to provide. After all they will have to factor in the cost of providing a legally defined orderly shutdown. Plus making sure that their backups manage to be “good enough” to pass legal muster.

Hope too that the actual service isn’t “close enough” to something that looks like it _should_ fall into this law that a lawyer thinks it does, but “far enough” that it ether can’t meet it, or becomes prohibitively costly to do so.

Not all internet services are run by AOL or Google. Many are run by tiny start-ups that don’t really have the money to provide what they are providing, let alone jumping through a few more hoops.

I mean, I would loved to have had a chance to buy CDs full of my digital photos. On the other hand, if they had been required by law to provide them to me for up to six months after shutdown, and for free they would have had to set aside a tidy sum for that, and probably never would have started business. Then I wouldn’t even have the relatively few bits of that era of my personal photography I thought was worth having someone print and mail me.

Also more companies that are flaming out would totally flame out rather then being bought up “oh, if we buy them out of chap 11 we have to provide all their customers a way to migrate to a new service, which having seen the fragility of the last generation of service they will do so as fast as they can rather then just stick with the ‘under new management’ version of the service… never mind then”

Again, I agree it is a problem. Bigger then many folks think even. (smaller then people starving, and many other issues though)

I just don’t think all solutions to a problem are necessarily better then the original problem

“Historians record history, not insist that historical things be preserved for people to observe in their original form in situ.”

Wrong, and stupidly so. How does one “record” events that took place centuries or millenia before one’s birth?

Historians reconstruct the past from the massive and hard to fake wealth of documents left behind, most of which didn’t look all that earthshaking at the time. Eg. old phonebooks, diaries of people you never heard of, etc. All that one need do to discover this is talk to an actual historian.

But running your mouth off is ever so much more fun than checking your facts, isn’t it?

Two years ago a free hosting service in Thailand went down. It took with it the sole website of the Thai Assembly of the Poor, an organization representing two million subsistence farmers and ex-farmer urban slum inhabitants, and with that went their self-description of how the World Bank’s “development” programs destroyed Thailand’s rural economy. Rather than attempting to rebuild their website, which is still visible in the Internet Archive, the Assembly started posting images of rural protests and activist work into unstable, unarchived Data Clouds such as blog hosting services and Slide.com.

This shit is important, dude.

It’s not like storage is expensive; in fact, for many values of storage, there is no measurable marginal cost (there’s a lot of underutilised HDDs out there) until you fill a really big bucket. (For example, the price of going from 250GB to 500GB is nutzoid cheap.)

I really wonder if the person who did this can even measure how much they supposedly saved.