Internet Archaeology

The Internet Archaeology project is a wonderful collaboration between artists, designers, and tech-minded people around the world, started by an artist named Ryder Ripps in New York.

"Essentially we're going through older, overlooked websites and archiving content," says participant Stefan Moore, "But the main difference between this and archive.org is that here, there's a focus on showcasing what we find."

Old-school webhost Geocities will be shutting down later this month, so the site seems particularly timely right now.

"We just finished archiving and curating a bunch of geocities flash sites," says Stefan, "Check it out under the section marked 'webgrabs."

internetarchaeology.org and internetarchaeology.tumblr.com.

• [teapot]

  So awesome. Some totally NSFW but I found that out the hard way :P

• [Anonymous]

  Find The Spam FTW!

• [Church]

  See also Jason Scott’s ascii.textfiles.com. I’m fond of this (well earned) rant, myself.

• [kmoser]

  Look like what archiveteam.org is doing, too.

• [toolbag]

  In the last five minutes on internetarcheology I saw more unicorns and dragons than I’ve seen in the last ten yeas.

  • [Anonymous]

    @toolbag: You’ve obviously never been to Gen Con. For those few days, I think Indianapolis is the dragon/unicorn capital of Earth.

• [JoshP]

  let’s spin terms for fun.
  netology, achaeonetology, socionetology, global internet history, data archival reference retrieval autonomous collectivization and interpretation specialist, ancient pornologization of mass media history 101, pre-postpost modern non-multidimensional image showcasing… sorry, the kitty was too cute.

• [VagabondAstronomer]

  This is pretty timely, at least for me personally. With Yahoo shuttering Geocities on the 26th, I am having to remove all of my files from my 10 year old space and astronomy site. Kind of bittersweet (1st of November would have been the 10th anniversary). Fascinating stuff they’ve dug up there.