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!
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
