Jason Scott's Weblog
I’m going to mention two backup projects. Both have been under way for some time, but the world randomly decided the end of November 2016 was the big day, so here I am. The first is that the Internet Archive is adding another complete mirror of the Wayback machine to one of our satellite offices […]
One of the most successful (and ongoing) projects that Archive Team has done is Archivebot. It’s a crowdsourced archiving operation that goes after anything that needs archiving, be it webpages, tweets, videos and other online scrapings, and allows them all to be captured in a competent, useful manner, 24/7. It has grown over the years and is […]
It’s been a nice bunch of years for presentations and talks I’ve been giving. I started getting on stage to make noise around 1999 (I’d been on stage before that, but for other things). From about 2002 onward, I added slides to the mix, and for most of the 2000s, every talk was usually different […]
A little over a month ago, I cooked up a grandiose plan with the Archive Team to back up the Internet Archive, and discussed what that might entail and how one might approach it. How’s that thing going, anyway? Remarkably Well would be the best description. The working group (and let’s be clear – I’m […]
It’s inevitable that Archive Team would try to archive the hand that archives it. We dump a lot of data into the Internet Archive – hundreds of gigabytes a day. And the Archive itself has a goodly amount of petabytes in its stacks. Thanks to a series of articles and appearances, the Archive’s getting some […]
Here’s how a planned large-scale set of roving ideas and goals ends up being a case of just doing one thing right. The original plan when I cooked up Just Solve The Problem Month was that there was a set of problems out there that just needed a few hundred people to contribute time and […]
In 2009, I proposed the idea that rapidly-shutting-down websites should be quickly downloaded and saved by a fast acting and future-minded group of web archivists. I called them the A-Team, or Archive Team, and said they’d be the last resort for online history that was otherwise doomed. An unbelievably huge amount of web history had […]
As time goes on, people begin to use phrases like “saved” when it comes to Archive Team projects. That’s not quite accurate. If a website or webpage is simple, utilizing only images and text, chances are pretty good that we can get a reasonable copy of it. If, however, it utilizes any strange scripting, access […]
I had hoped “Just Solve the Problem Month” would be a yearly thing. In my original entry about this event and how it would go, I expected us to aim ourselves at a new direction and throw people at a problem that just needed some attention. Every year. So each year would bring to […]
Salutations, dewy-eyed fuckstick. I’ve met you before, of course. I’ve met the type you are, the way you are, and your dreams you think you’re selling are nothing new. Your whole culture is poison, shifting its language and buzzwords and goals on a whim to satisfy what you think people are going to buy into. […]