By the way, I gather you are all still sorting out the various GeoCites sites your team managed to save. Compared with your million or so, I got only a mere handful. However, given the amorphous nature of GeoCities, there are probably a few things I caught that you could include. I do have a list I could send you.

First: the latter focus is on the owner of the site – undoubtedly the person most concerned with saving a memorial. However, there are plenty of websites that are created at least as much to be useful to other people. The readers of websites may have no legal rights over them; but that doesn’t mean that they are happy when a site they have been enjoying suddenly vanishes.

Of course, it is easy to say that they should save the site to their own computer. I have certainly done that on a number of occasions, just as I keep multiple back-ups of my own website. But not everyone knows how, any more than most people know how to HTML a webpage. Take GeoCities sites: a lot of them were written using “Site-Builder” software available from Yahoo. People who used that never did have a copy on their own computer: the site was created on the server; and making a back-up was distinctly less than simple.

When GeoCities was counting down to doom, instructions were posted so that people could save their websites. These said to go to the top left of the screen, click on “File” and then on “Save as”. However, on many people’s browsers, this didn’t work: because of the side-frame that held the ads, all you got was an error message. Sure, I figured out how to get around this (“View/source”, save that; and then right-click on every graphic on the page). The point, though, isn’t that I personally worked this out: I had my site backed up anyway, though I used the technique to save a couple of hundred others. The point is that most people know even less about computers than I do. In fact, several people asked me to save their sites for them because they couldn’t figure out how to do it themselves.

Second: this is all human-oriented, even when you talk about the significance of archives to history. What about the websites themselves? Some of them are useful. Some of them are well-designed, with attractive layout, colours, and graphics. (Some are remarkably horrible; but what of it? The finger-painting of a kid in kindergarten isn’t the work of Picasso. That doesn’t mean we close art galleries.) No one seems to point out that the destruction of something that is useful or beautiful is wrong in itself.

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.)