The web in an Eye blink
this talk is called "the web in an eye blink" but it is about people and the web
I give talks, I collect things; a lot of what I do is gain attention - if my clothing hadn't shown that already
I was very affected by a speech by Wilson Miner wilsonminer.com - he built a tool onstage that everyone wanted
a talk is not a piece of paper that you drags your finger across for an hour, but a series of strings you can pull on
Always wear a Viking hat when you visit Iceland - the locals love it
I have a famous cat called @sockington who has 4.5M twitter followers - it revealed how arbitrary fame it to me
It was talking to someone from the Today show who wanted me to sedate my cat and fly to NY that made me realise
Garfield joined twitter but only had 200,000 followers and @sockington welcomed him like Keith Richards talking to Bieber
when I was about 9, my mother woke me up and said my father was dangerous and we had to leave
My mother said "grab what you need" and I took my dog and my blanket
I learned some important lessons: Nothing is permanant; you are responsible for your destiny
when you make your dad pull over so you can pose with the Apple sign — in sunglasses
once humans get their hands on things they make the things come alive - even if it is a BBS
A bullitin board was bascially a computer with a modem and a lonely person attached to it
young Jason would back up everything he had found on bulletin boards and back them up on floppy discs
when bulletin boards stopped bing important in my life. No, when they stopped being something I did daily…
when the web came along. I realised that BBS were persona non grata on the internet
so I grabbed textfiles.com and put up 30,000 files. Then everyone sent me the stuff that they had stashed
I am an accidental historian. I graduated from High School with a 1.7 GPA —that's hard to do without shooting up school
I graduated Emerson College with a 2.1 GPA - it turns out you cna sneak your way in the back way to respectability
I am old enough that when I brought a laptop to school and they assumed I was cheating
my title is "Free Range Archivist" at the Internet Archive- i sound like a FPS final boss
the day I tried to download the Internet Archive, it was like a hamster trying to chew a baseball
the Internet Archive is an amazing collection of human culture in so many different forms
I have personally overseen or uploaded about 2% of the Internet Archive
if the Internet Archive being in a church isn't weird enough it is full of tiny statues of people
If you're at the Internet Archive for 3 years, they make a statue of you. I love that they did that
the Internet Archive is the example of a guy who got really rich and didn't turn into a shit (@brewsterkahle)
I can't overstate how much of our history would not exist without the Internet Archive
for a lot of people the Internet Archive was the web
before San Francisco was a tech-bro soup that solved the problem of bro's driving each other everywhere, it was the web
the web - people will normally think of the time where we learnt to use browsers as the web
back in 1992 the web was couple of hundred sites
the web is ridiculous; it is a fast talker. it can snow you; it's unendingly bored; it gets excited when you buy things
today @medium said that they found a point between a tweet and longform. It was like being sold a donut. it's a blog
pizza hut was the very first ecommerce site on the net - they'd ask your address and phone number and call you back
when geocities died a lot of people said "good riddance" - but it was a lot of people making things for free
for some people geocities was the largest audience their genetic line had ever reached
when geocities went down I was very angry. this is their cage - it held 9TB
At the time of it's death, geocities had no-one assigned to it and was he 212th site on the net
the web was never really designed to be permenant -a URL was not built to be forever. It's time to redo that
Archive Team is a group of guerrilla archivists who rush and take copies before things go down
today @google said @blogger would take down any nudity that did not have artistic merit by march 15th
tuens out google is an archive like a supermarket is a food museum
if we see too many errors on a website, we go grab a copy, jst to be sure
we pull in about 400GB a day just to be sure in case some guy has it wrong
life is a lossy format - we do not have enough capacity to store everything
we don't know what is important. if it's easy to take snapshot that will go away later, lets do it
my uncle wore long sleeves, because he had a number tattooed on his arm, but he climbed a fence and got away
when I got into a screaming phone battle with one of the founders of ello— just in case, as I didn't get to do it to FB
turns out nobody cared about ello so it can go die
I hate being the gatekeeper - deciding what gets to live and die
time capsules are a very odd thing - why put things in concrete for others to see after you die
my definition of the Long Now foundation is us going da dada dah dah and in 1000 years they go "dah da"
this is us now::we have things that fy in the sky that kill people;things in our pocket that tell us who to sex with
a school in minnesota put a cornerstone with a time capsule in and they dig it up in10 years, and it is full of water
this guy is slug - he creeated SpaceWar - if you go to the Computer History Museum he will kick your ass at SpaceWar
there is a thing I've been working on for 3 years - how do we handle software
we managed the web, we managed books and music and even video, but software is harder
we got this smurf game from colecovision running in the browser that was a revelation
what is the thing that runs code in the browser that wasn't destroyed by Larry Ellison? Javascript
we have all these old games running on MESS in the browser in javascript
we now have the emularity - we run Windows in a browser running PPP connecting to the net using Netscape
the most important thing - we put up 25,000 software packages, but everyone plays Oregon Trail
it's less about the tool - which is amazing - but that I grew up through tragedy to build dreams of these children
that is what is important to me - that a kid in school can use a computer from this year to play a program 20 years old
nothing is permanent, but love it while it is here. You are responsible for your destiny, but your destiny is shared
don't walk down the streets of Belfast as the black angel of death - I've done it
we are the temporary caretakers of this chain of memory so we should look after it