Copyright law being behind the times is why we can't have nice things. Read the rest

The Internet Archives' VHS Vault isn't new, but since the beginning of the year it's been refreshed with hundreds of new uploads, reports LifeHacker.

So what kind of gems will you find in the VHS Vault? The clips, shows and films run the gamut from instructional videos, to documentaries, to children’s programs, to workout videos. Want to watch the 1935 film version of Les Misérables? It’s on there. Want to work out with Traci Lords? Your wish is the VHS Vault’s command. Want to watch every single episode of Salute Your Shorts? Get ready to spend some quality time with Budnick, Dina and Ug Lee. How about an introduction to Windows 95 with Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry? Yes, that exists, and it’s on there, too.

Image: Internet Archive Read the rest

Back in August, I gave the closing keynote at the second Decentralized Web Summit, entitled "Big Tech's problem is Big, not Tech; the Internet Archive released video right afterwards, but now they've cleaned up the video and rereleased it for your viewing pleasure. Read the rest

The Internet Archive has a wonderful front-end: GifCities, a search engine for the myriad of GIFs that once graced legendary website hosting service Geocities. [via Andy Baio]

GifCities: The Geocities Animated Gif Search Engine was a special project of the Internet Archive done as part of our 20th Anniversary to highlight and celebrate fun aspects of the amazing history of the web as represented in the web archive and the Wayback Machine. Geocities was an early web hosting service, started in 1994 and acquired by Yahoo in 1999, with which users could create their own custom websites. The platform hosted over 38 million user-built pages and was at one time the third most visited site on the web. In 2009, Yahoo announced it was closing down the service, at which point the Internet Archive attempted to archive as much of the content as possible. ... Mining this collection, we extracted over 4,500,000 animated GIFs (1,600,000 unique images) and then used the filenames and directory path text to build a best-effort “full text” search engine. Each GIF also links back to the original Geocities page on which it was embedded (and some of these pages are even more awesome than the GIFs).

If you're just here for the under construction GIFs, here are all of them. Read the rest

Wednesday, October 21, in San Francisco, the Internet Archive will honor the Grateful Dead at what archive.org calls their biggest celebration of the year.

It seems the awesome approach to business taken by the Dead for so many years has caught their eye.

Tickets are free, you just need to sign up. Here are the event details:

Building Libraries Together

Celebrating the Passionate People Building the Internet Archive

Wednesday, October 21

at the Internet Archive

300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco

6 p.m. Reception & Hands-on Demo Stations

7 p.m. Program begins

Come honor our partners–the hackers and historians making amazing things with the Internet Archive’s collections.

And we’ll present the first Internet Archive Hero Award to the Grateful Dead–Pioneers in Sharing.

Come try these Hands-on Demos:

SCAN a book with our next generation Scribe

LISTEN to a vintage recording

EXPLORE political TV ads and funny films

PLAY a 3-D video game with the Oculus Rift

VIEW Grateful Dead memorabilia

ENJOY free food, drink and music!

Get your free ticket here.

Read the rest

Thousands of classic games from Prince of Persia to Wolfenstein 3D are available for free on the Internet Archive, and now you can embed and play them directly inside of individual tweets. Read the rest