Web Archaeology

July 30th, 2008

I like to start the day with a good laugh so I have subscribed to Wulffmorgenthaler’s comic strip for quite some time now. A while back I received the comic strip that you can see below (click it to enlarge), and it got me wondering if this scenario really was as far fetched as it was made out to be.

I did a little research on Google and found out that there already are a bunch of ‘web archaeologists’ out there who enjoy to locate dead websites and preserve them. One of the most interesting sites belongs to Steve Baldwin who has gathered information on several derelict and abandoned websites for a while now; “The Museum of Interactive Failure” as he calls it.

For example, did you know that the massively popular myspace.com originally used to be an unsuccessful file-sharing service until 2000? A fact that, most likely, only a handful of MySpace users are aware of, and a piece of information that could easily be completely forgotten over time if it wasn’t for Baldwin’s and other web diggers’ websites.

Another exciting web page is the Internet Archive (or the ‘Wayback Engine’ as it is also called). The Internet Archive has been around since 1996 and it’s purpose is to build an Internet library, and offer historians, scholars, and researchers a permanent access to both forgotten and current websites.

The Wayback Engine lets you enter any web address, and then allows you to select different links from different years, displaying what the particular page looked like that year – This way you can see how certain websites have developed over time.

If you have been with us for a long time and would like to take a walk down memory lane, then I suggest you try to enter www.barablu.com and see how our page has evolved over the past 3 years.

Written by
michael thomsen

Filed under: Web
Tags: abandoned websites, barablu, dead URLs, dead websites, file-sharing service, ghost sites, internet archive, internet library, myspace, wayback engine, wullfmorgenthaler