#Website archive tool archive#

When MySpace, GeoCities, and Friendster were reconfigured or sold, millions of accounts vanished. Sites hosted by corporations tend to die with their hosts. Web pages donвЂ™t have to be deliberately deleted to disappear. Social media, public records, junk: in the end, everything goes. Last year, BuzzFeed deleted more than four thousand of its staff writersвЂ™ early posts, apparently because, as time passed, they looked stupider and stupider. In 2006, David Cameron gave a speech in which he said that Google was democratizing the world, because вЂњmaking more information available to more peopleвЂќ was providing вЂњthe power for anyone to hold to account those who in the past might have had a monopoly of power.вЂќ Seven years later, BritainвЂ™s Conservative Party scrubbed from its Web site ten yearsвЂ™ worth of Tory speeches, including that one. Chances are, though, that it actually wonвЂ™t. No one believes any longer, if anyone ever did, that вЂњif itвЂ™s on the Web it must be true,вЂќ but a lot of people do believe that if itвЂ™s on the Web it will stay on the Web. It might seem, and it often feels, as though stuff on the Web lasts forever, for better and frequently for worse: the embarrassing photograph, the regretted blog (more usually regrettable not in the way the slaughter of civilians is regrettable but in the way that bad hair is regrettable). StrelkovвЂ™s вЂњWe just downed a planeвЂќ post lasted barely two hours. The average life of a Web page is about a hundred days. The only real evidence of the original claim lies in the Wayback Machine. Two hours and twenty-two minutes later, Arthur Bright, the Europe editor of the Christian Science Monitor, tweeted a picture of the screenshot, along with the message вЂњGrab of Donetsk militant StrelkovвЂ™s claim of downing what appears to have been MH17.вЂќ By then, StrelkovвЂ™s VKontakte page had already been edited: the claim about shooting down a plane was deleted. G.M.T., the Wayback Machine saved a screenshot of StrelkovвЂ™s VKontakte post about downing a plane.

#Website archive tool archive#

вЂњStrelkov is the field commander in Slaviansk and one of the most important figures in the conflict,вЂќ Shmelev had written in an e-mail to the Internet Archive on July 1st, and his page вЂњdeserves to be recorded twice a day.вЂќ StrelkovвЂ™s VKontakte page was on ShmelevвЂ™s list. Shmelev is one of about a thousand librarians and archivists around the world who identify possible acquisitions for the Internet ArchiveвЂ™s subject collections, which are stored in its Wayback Machine, in San Francisco. Two weeks before the crash, Anatol Shmelev, the curator of the Russia and Eurasia collection at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford, had submitted to the Internet Archive, a nonprofit library in California, a list of Ukrainian and Russian Web sites and blogs that ought to be recorded as part of the archiveвЂ™s Ukraine Conflict collection. The Web wasnвЂ™t built to preserve its past the Wayback Machine aims to remedy that.