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Yvl
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Posted: Mon Nov 13, 2006 1:13 am Post subject: Internet Archeologists |
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(Spelling, context of the title?)
Here's an interesting idea I thought of... in the future, will historians scan the websites of our time for historical or cultural clues? What will their reactions be? _________________
Last edited by Yvl on Mon Nov 13, 2006 2:29 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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little fish
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Posted: Mon Nov 13, 2006 1:16 am Post subject: |
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that would be fun to fined out, they may, they may not but i thnik they will _________________
is this ok Wes?
P.S. thanks Sophita |
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RedCydranth
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Posted: Mon Nov 13, 2006 12:05 pm Post subject: |
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I beleive the term you're going for it Internet Archaeologists. Architects build buildings and structures. Archaeologists un-earth the past, usually through time dating and such.
However, I think with our current forms of information keeping, the future will have no problems looking back and finding out what we had to say or what caused what to happen. I am unsure how far in the future you're talking here and what happened to the human race that caused a gap in knowledge that would require them to revert to seeking out info firsthand rather than opening up their latest encyclopedia and lookig up the information which you speak of?
Has there been some cataclysmic event that caused us to all die off except a few who seclude themselves underground for centuries and then finally re-explore the surface not really knowing the human history and decide to look through computers to see what they can find out? The nature of your question should be fleshed out a bit more.
However in the cataclysmic end of our society, I don't think that the internet will work like you'd think. In order for it to work, all the servers tha host the information would have to be powered and running. The internet isn't a mythological land where info is stored, there's actual mainframes and hard drives that store everything we type and say online. So, should an event occur that shuts down the entirity of our lives, the internet too would fall as a casualty.
An errant thought passed through my head. Perhaps you mean that the human species never dies off, but the internet itself continues and a century from now will there be historians who catalog the old websites and try and learn more about us in our current state. However, this to me seems unlikely. In a similar reason to the cataclysm scenario, in order for the stuff thats on the internet now to be there 100 years from now, the servers and comuters that store it need to be actively running. If say, Yahoo!, goes bankrupt and suddenly shut down everything they own, all the sites that rely on Yahoo would be shut down as well. Those that switch to a different host site would still be active and thus not need to be historically excavated. Basically what I'm saying is, since the internet requires a certain level of activity, no, the prospect of historically looking back at defunct sites is not going to happen. Lets say you make a website dedicated to cotton candy. You put it up and its accessible to everyone. But you then pass away and nobody takes over your cotton candy site. It would get shut down by your host eventually and nobody would ever go there again.
However, the idea on paper does seem interesting if there were a possibility that in the future, one could go through the archives of the internet and explore our current period. _________________ I'm sorry and I apologize are the same thing.
Except at a funeral.
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Yvl
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Posted: Mon Nov 13, 2006 2:39 pm Post subject: |
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Were there not cataclysmic events, like that one volcano in roman times, that we have been able to get information out of?
Well, what I was thinking anyway, is like, 500 years from now, will people look back at old websites that are still functioning for the sake of research? Perhaps websites and images saved from the internet rather than the internet itself, if those sites don't exist. I could imagine an archaeologist entering this hole in the ground that used to be a house, with a few broken furnishings around its blackened interior, and finding a primitave computer that science then proceeds to restore.
I mean, I've personally got a few gigabytes on this computer of quotes, images, and saved websites on my computer. What would the society of the future have to say about this? _________________
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Vextor
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Posted: Mon Nov 13, 2006 3:00 pm Post subject: |
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There is a site called archive.org, which keeps a pretty acurate trail of past websites and past incarnations of current sites. Going there, you can see what suikosource looked like in 2001, etc. It's a good way to recover lost content if your site is HTML based. |
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Elc
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Posted: Mon Nov 13, 2006 5:36 pm Post subject: |
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Of course, plenty of content can also been lost on archive.org after sites have shut down due to the new owners of domain names previously held by the closed sites will disallow robots. So, when you try to look up a favourite site of the past, you will get an error page telling you the site has disallowed robots.
Of course, I just tried to access a site which had that happen to me in the past, and it's coming up just fine now. (man, I love it when that happens)
I imagine that, in the future, researching past websites will reveal development as different as if we were to research the earliest known webpages. Some sites today are designed quite well, while others are abysmal, trying to cram far too much onto the same page which usually results in a busy mess. _________________
"You make me smash the clock and feel, I'd rather die behind the wheel.
Time was never on my side, So on I wait my whole lifetime." |
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