Credit: https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox
Paper is an honest medium. Once committed to the page by Future’s heavy iron, the images and words in this magazine are unalterable, and could, potentially, last the many centuries until the prophesied year of the Linux Desktop finally arrives.
The same is not true of the internet. Data is ephemeral, and updating a website or an individual page takes seconds. Wiping an entire website from existence, along with all of the words and images it contains is as simple as rm -rf /var/www/.
In 2000, one of the largest bodies of knowledge concentrated online was Encarta, an epic site with more than 60,000 articles. Yet by 2009, Encarta was dead – pounded into irrelevance by the free and vastly superior Wikipedia. In 2010, encarta.com redirected to a free dictionary on MSN, and in 2013, the dictionary was dropped and seekers of knowledge were instead redirected to the Bing search results page for the word Encarta. The top result was the Wikipedia entry for Microsoft’s now defunct competitor. Visit encarta.com today and you’ll note that Microsoft no longer even bothers with redirects. You’ll get a connection timed-out error.
Only those with an original Encarta CD (and an optical drive to put it in) are able to appreciate and enjoy the wonder of what was once the world’s premier electronic encyclopaedia.
Thousands of sites drop off the internet every day. The domains lapse as owners can’t be bothered to renew, and are sold at auction by ISPs. Your favourite small blog now serves adverts for casinos, and you’ll never be able to read the ridiculous rants of the rambling
