A while ago, I was reminiscing of the time when I used the bookmarking service del.icio.us^. As someone who has come to loathe most online platforms in their current form, I did enjoy this little service. Introduced in 2003 - a time where our data wasn't yet harvested (that much) yet - it did what it was supposed to do, nothing more and nothing less.
=> del.icio.us
This brought me to see if I could still log in, and I could! While the old bookmarking functions aren't operational anymore, they do allow you to export your bookmarks. I imported everything in my current bookmarking tool and had a look.
It was a fun blast from the past, for sure. Remembering events from 15 or so years ago made for a wonderful few hours of nostalgic browsing. Time flies! However, it also made something else painfully obvious:
More than half of the linked pages didn't work anymore.
Yeah. That sucks. Not everything needs to be kept forever but for a lot of content, there is value in its preservation. Imagine the historical value of early-internet blog posts, or software that isn't sold or even supported anymore, or papers that have gone forever. It made me realize that much of the "early web" is slowly but surely disappearing, for a number of reasons: domains expiring, people moving on, or siloed platforms shutting down. Not only that, but the current trend to prioritise new and viral content (regardless of quality) over anything else, drives search engines to slowly forget or de-rank content^ from older parts of the web.
This is alarming.
I've always found that if you are willing to purposefully look for it, the older and unusual stuff often offers a much richer experience than the current-day clickbait trash that is pushed in your face. Find the weird and curious web, the off the beaten track articles, the relics from the past and the niche topics. Clive Thompson was getting close when he called it rewilding your attention^.
But how do you find it if it's not available anymore? This is where archive.org^ comes in. Perhaps you're already familiar with The Internet Archive but it is best compared to a massive digital library with a mission statement to provide "universal access to all knowledge". Ambitious, I know, but it's currently doing a better job at this than any other organisation.
=> archive.org
I've been spending so much time on there lately that it's worth dedicating a separate post to list up some of the cool stuff you can find on there. I know I'm only scratching the surface with the things I find but even so, it feels so valuable to keep all of this from getting lost. To give you a taster, I want to share a small subset of the unique things you can find on archive.org (obviously filtered through the very biased lens of my interests on tech, retro computing, hacking and other random things):
Books/Magazines/Audiobooks:
=>
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Tech/Software:
=>
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Audio/Video:
=>
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Games:
=>
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Various:
=>
|
Finally, before you go, please consider a donation to archive.org^. Archiving the web as we know it is important, and they can use all the help they can get. If you can't support with money, consider if there are any types of content you have, to upload to the site. You never know what someone else will find valuable. Consider sharing it, before it gets lost.
Do you have any cool and unique archive.org links that aren't mentioned here? Send me an email (see my Contact page) and I'll add it to the list!
=> Reply via email: ghostzero@ghostze.ro
⁂
=> Back This content has been proxied by September (3851b).Proxy Information
text/gemini