07.17.05
Blog Survey and the IA
If you’re a blogger, check out the MIT Weblog Survey.
One of the questions it asked was about when I started blogging. Although I know it was about 2 years ago, I lost the original content because I was using a different database and never bothered to export any of the data (lazy me)… so I wandered over to the Internet Archive (someone took those jokes about “downloading the Internet” seriously). The “Way Back” feature is quite useful for going back in time, just as long as you don’t want to go back before 1996 that is. So for example, you can relive the frontpage of the BBC news on 9/11/01 (just the first example that came to mind, but maybe not the best one). The first recording of garethwestern.com was January 15th, 2004, although I started the website a few months prior to that. This led me to wondering about how often they take a snapshot of a site. You may notice there are way more archives for 2001 (notably from September 11th onwards) than any other year, so I wonder if Internet traffic is a factor… but I suppose they just archive more when they’ve got the space to spare, and give the larger sites the higher priorities. The price of storage space per GB has, obviously, dropped rapidly over the past couple of decades. As if to prove the point, the Internet Archive recently received over a petabyte of storage space. Now that’s a crazy large amount of storage space! I bet that could probably even hold Nikolai’s infamous porn collection… 
Nikolai said,
July 17, 2005 at 10:45 pm
No, the petabyte couldn’t hold my collection of porn.
Kelly Johnstone said,
July 27, 2005 at 7:48 am
Hi Gareth…I can’t even believe I came across this website! It was really good to see some photos of everyone from Awty - I know I wasn’t there for very long but I feel like I was! I hope everyone is doing well, including yourself - glad to hear you weren’t injured in the London bomb blasts. Not sure what the world is supposed to do about this, on that score…
Anyway, just thought I’d comment on this very well-put-together website (kudos to Hesam, he’s clearly an expert!) and say hey to all you familiar faces.
Take care,
Kelly =)