The Internet is for Cats

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, after pr0n, the most important genre of content on the Internet is cat videos. But in the early days of the Web, there was no video. For sure, there was pr0n, but how did the Internet work without cat videos? Follow me below the fold for some research into the early history of Web content.

Guest post: Ilya Kreymer on oldweb.today

Recently, the remarkably productive Ilya Kreymer put up an emulation-based system for displaying archived Web pages using contemporary browsers at http://oldweb.today/. I mentioned it in my talk at the last CNI meeting, but I had misunderstood the details, so Ilya had to correct me.

Ilya's work is much more important that I originally realized. It isn't just a very good example of the way that emulation can layer useful services over archived content. It is also a different approach to delivering emulations, leveraging the current trend towards containers and thus less dependent on specialized, preservation-only technology.

I asked Ilya to write a guest post explaining how it works, which is below the fold.

Aggregating Web Archives

Starting five years ago, I've posted many times about the importance of Memento (RFC7089), and in particular about the way Memento Aggregators in principle allow the contents of all Web archives to be treated as a single, homogeneous resource. I'm part of an effort by Sawood Alam and others to address some of the issues in turning this potential into reality. Sawood has a post on the IIPC blog, Memento: Help Us Route URI Lookups to the Right Archives that reveals two interesting aspects of this work.

First, Ilya Kreymer's oldweb.today shows there is a significant demand for aggregation:

We learned in the recent surge of oldweb.today (that uses MemGator to aggregate mementos from various archives) that some upstream archives had issues handling the sudden increase in the traffic and had to be removed from the list of aggregated archives.

Second, the overlap between the collections at different Web archives is low, as shown in Sawood's diagram. This means that the contribution of even small Web archives to the effectiveness of the aggregated whole is significant.This is important in an environment where the Internet Archive has by far the biggest collection of preserved Web pages. It can be easy to think that the efforts of other Web archives add little. But Sawood's research shows that, if they can be effectively aggregated, even small Web archives can make a contribution.

Why not store it all?

Back in October I wrote Two in Two Days, linking to two of Maciej Cegłowski's barn-burning speeches, What Happens Next Will Amaze You and Haunted By Data. I should have been paying more attention, because Cory Doctorow just pointed out that three weeks after I wrote Cegłowski gave another barn-burner, this one in Sydney entitled The Website Obesity Crisis. It is a must-read, laugh-out-loud gem. Below the fold, I start from it to examine two answers to the question "why not store all of it?"

Trade Pacts and Trade Secrets

I already pointed out that:

The TPP chapter leaked by Wikileaks mandates that countries “judicial authorities shall, at least, have the authority to [...] order the destruction of devices and products found to be involved in" any activity that circumvents controls that manufacturers build into their software or devices. This makes the equipment white hats use to find vulnerabilities in, for example, things in the IoT subject to destruction.

Now, Glynn Moody at Techdirt points to a column in The Globe and Mail by Dan Breznitz, professor of Innovation Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. Breznitz explains that the TPP not merely greatly increases the intellectual property protections for both copyrights and patents, but also for trade secrets. Below the fold, details of some of the ways in which added protection for trade secrets is a catastrophically bad idea.

Amy Fry on library collections

Everyone interested in academic communication should read Amy Fry's magisterial Conventional Wisdom or Faulty Logic? The Recent Literature on Monograph Use and E-book Acquisition. She shows how, by endlessly repeating the conclusion of a single study of a single library now more than 35 years out of date, publishers and their consultants have convinced librarians that traditional collection development has failed and needs to be replaced by patron-driven acquisition. And how, building on this propaganda victory, they moved on to convince librarians that, despite studies showing the opposite, readers across all disciplines preferred e-books to print. Below the fold, some details.

Annotation progress from Hypothes.is

I've blogged before on the importance of annotation for scholarly communication and the hypothes.is effort to implement it. At the beginning of December Hypothesis made a major announcement:

On Tuesday, we announced a major new initiative to bring this vision to reality, supported by a coalition of over 40 of the world’s essential scholarly organizations, such as JSTOR, PLOS, arXiv, HathiTrust, Wiley and HighWire Press, who are linking arms to establish a new paradigm of open collaborative annotation across the world’s knowledge.

Below the fold, more details on this encouraging development.