Jason Scott's Weblog
The best projects cause a lot of people to shrug or go “oh, that’s nice” and then a much smaller percentage of people to drop whatever they’re carrying and stagger forward in disbelief. Here’s one of those. For some people, just bringing up the phrase “The Internet Underground Music Archive”, or “IUMA”, summons memories of […]
I officially started work at the Internet Archive over a year ago. Let’s remove any tension – it has been a fantastic year, where I have gotten more done in the way of preservation and computer history work than my entire previous 40 years combined. Internet Archive seems to like me, I really like them, […]
Still lovin’ the job at the Internet Archive. I’m starting to forget I ever worked anywhere else and all those times I wasn’t enjoying myself. (I actually enjoyed myself a lot at the various jobs I used to have, but it was rarely because of the job itself.) I last posted that I’d added some […]
As part of my work for the Game Developers Conference as historian and archivist, I have been given their entire backlog of recorded conference tapes. Many of them have not seen the light of day since they were recorded – others were converted to RealMedia format, and then guess what happened next. We’ve been holding […]
I don’t normally post “up to the minute” entries, but what the heck. Today, Facebook announced it was changing up, completely, how you interact with Facebook, including a whole range of profile adjustments, retrieval of random items from the past, and a whole new range of “partners” who will be shoving items into Facebook (and, […]
Part of my work with the Internet Archive is writing weblog entries about parts of the whole crazy collections they have to expand knowledge of the mission out to greater realms of folks. I considered writing one on this exhibit/collection but decided it was just a little too far this side of weird, so it […]
There’s enough going on both behind the scenes and onstage with the Archive Team talk at DEFCON, I think it functions on multiple levels as an explanation of speaking techniques, how I design presentations, and what the approach was for it. You really should have watched the speech before reading this entry – here’s the […]
Let’s get the numbers out of the way immediately before they’re misreported. Archive Team rescued, roughly, 20 percent of all the profiles on Friendster. This took us many months and reflects the sheer mass of Friendster’s data, well into the 70-80 terabyte range, behind custom software, and which they summarily deleted from their user accounts. […]
Somehow, a post just seemed like it would be drowned in a sea of other posts and the usual sad debates about the mass deletion of information. So, I recorded an mp3. A Message to Salon.Com (3 minutes) If you’d like to help, please visit the Tabletalk.Salon.Com project page on the Archive Team website.
Archive Team, that ruthless band of site-saving scalliwags, has been working like crazy on a new downloading project, and we really, really need your help. Friendster, one of the first social sites that took off in a big way until being overtaken by other services, has been bought out by a company that intends to […]