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[ox] fwd: Page by Page History of the Web (aus der New York Times)



Page by Page History of the Web

October 29, 2001

By JOHN SCHWARTZ



Wheb I was a little boy growing up in Galveston, Tex.,
there was no more amazing place to me than the Rosenberg
Library, a haven where a young reader could imagine
spending many happy years of discovery. It seemed vast, but
also personal: in front of the building, a child could
clamber up the side of the seated statue of Henry
Rosenberg, the library's patron, and sit in his bronze lap.

Brewster Kahle wants to create within the Internet a
library that is as vast as the infinite library of my
dreams, and as personal as old Mr. Rosenberg's lap. And at
the same time, he is teaching us a parable about what we
used to call the new economy.

Mr. Kahle never has thought small.

Having become wealthy
through a variety of Internet ventures over the years, Mr.
Kahle, in 1996, took up collecting: Web pages - at last
count, more than 10 billion of them. His Internet Archive
project takes regular snapshots of millions of pages and,
until recently, stored them like photos in the attic. Last
week, the 41-year-old computer scientist celebrated the
archive's fifth anniversary by unveiling the Wayback
Machine, a free service that makes those old pages
available to anyone who can get to the World Wide Web. (It
is at web.archive.org, although it has been straining under
the traffic.)

Using the pages is as simple as typing an Internet address
into a search box and selecting a date. And it's big. The
archive computers currently hold some 100 terabytes of data
- compared with an estimated 20 terabytes of information in
the entire Library of Congress. The archive grows by 10
terabytes a month.

But what is it good for? After all, if the science fiction
author Theodore Sturgeon was right when he said that "90
percent of everything is crud," what is the percentage for
the blather-prone pages of the Internet? "On the Web, it's
probably more," Mr. Kahle admits. But even if you up
Sturgeon's estimate to 99 percent, that leaves 1,000
gigabytes of solid gold - and every user's definition of
gold will be different.

People searching the Internet, Mr. Kahle said, "have very
specific interests," and when they find the topic that
interests them, "they want it in extreme detail, like steam
locomotives in Georgia in the 1840's." The wonder of the
Web, he said, is that it has information about steam
locomotives in 1840.

Mr. Kahle introduced his brainchild - named, yes, for the
time machine used by the pedantic dog, Mr. Peabody, and his
boy, Sherman, from the "Rocky and Bullwinkle" cartoons -
with a flourish at the Bancroft Library at the University
of California at Berkeley on Wednesday. He demonstrated it
with a certified stunner: he pulled up a Web page from the
White House Web site from Sept. 10, 1996, with a press
release about President Clinton proclaiming the prevention
of hijacking and terrorist attacks in the air a priority.
Mr. Kahle said he had also used the system to read Web
pages created by the Heaven's Gate suicide cult and to find
a manual for a computer part that had been taken off of a
company's Web site in 1998.

He doesn't want to stop with Web pages. Mr. Kahle
(pronounced "Kale") is inviting copyright holders for
books, movies, music and more to add their creations to the
mix. Ultimately, he hopes to finally deliver the kind of
library that the ancients tried to create in Alexandria.
"We have the technology to make that huge collection again.
More than that, we have the technology to give people
access from anywhere in the world."

Mr. Kahle has talked this way before - specifically, when
he kicked off one of his Internet companies, Alexa, now a
subsidiary of Amazon.com. That company also tried to
archive the Net. In fact, its technology was used to build
the Internet Archive. But attempts to profit from the
venture were unsuccessful, Mr. Kahle admitted; even Amazon
(news/quote) has stopped putting money into it. "This year,
Amazon doesn't have any spare money to do services like
Alexa," he said.

But there is a big difference between having a good idea
and being able to make money on it, and the fact that you
can't make something pay does not necessarily mean it is
dumb.

Building free libraries is a noble effort, Mr. Kahle says,
citing the largesse of Andrew Carnegie in improving the
nation's literacy through a system of libraries. "People
ask, `How are you going to profit from this?' " he said.
"We're not. It's a library. It's worth it to spend millions
of dollars to build a library that doesn't cost users a
penny."

People who make libraries and archives their lives are
excited about the new collection. "Isn't it the coolest
thing around," said Christopher A. Lee, chairman of the
Electronic Records Section of the Society of American
Archivists. He suggested that social historians of the
future might use the archive to focus on things that today
seem mundane or even inane. "A lot of social historians
would say a Web site that says, `Here's a picture of me,
here's a little about my cat' tells us so many important
things about how people were using the Internet at a
particular point in time."

The project has spurred a kind of enthusiasm that hasn't
been seen in a while in the downhearted tech world.
Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford University law professor who
seeks to explain the interplay of technology and society,
was uncharacteristically ebullient. "My brand is
pessimism," he said. "This is not something to be
pessimistic about. Brewster is my hero."

Mr. Lessig not only admires the project for the knowledge
it will preserve. He said he also thinks it can shift the
balance in the debate over copyrights and access to
intellectual property like books, music and movies.

Holders of copyrights will eventually drag Mr. Kahle into
court, Mr. Lessig predicted. So far the battle over
copyright has been fought chiefly by copyright owners and
their lawyers on the one side, and college professors and
computer technicians on the other. Mr. Lessig says that
will change if people use the Wayback Machine. "We finally
have a clear and tangible example of what's at stake," he
said. "Brewster is defining the public domain." Users will
see "how easy and important this technology would be in
keeping us sane and honest about where we've been and where
we're going."

Mr. Lessig has a new book coming out on copyright this
month, but he says he would have rewritten the whole thing
if he had seen the Wayback Machine first.

Mr. Kahle said he is pleased that his new project is
getting attention. "You probably couldn't get an article
written about a library in 1999; in 1999, all of the
stories were about how to sell dog food over the Net."

For myself, I can't help but think that old Mr. Rosenberg
would be pleased.


http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/29/technology/ebusiness/29NECO.html?ex=10056556

59&ei=1&en=c7dd4facd818effd


Kurt-Werner Pörtner
 
________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.de/
Organisation: projekt oekonux.de


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