wayback machine | The Blogora

Submitted by Michael Faris on March 24, 2009 - 11:20pm

Thought I'd share an archival tool that's pretty useful. Most stuff on the internet, we think, is ephemeral and can be removed. However, a lot of stuff on the Internet is actually archived by the wayback machine, which allows you to enter a URL and see what the website looked like and check out its content from years before (going back to the late 90s, if the website was up).

Example: Penn State's website from Feb ~~2007~~ 1997

(Oh, and the name comes from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.)

This wikipedia article also lists some interesting court cases that have involved the site. This resource is also useful for discussions with students, some of whom think they can simply take stuff down off the Internet before applying for a job. Nope, I can probably find an old version of your Facebook page if I wanted to, before you made it private. (I have heard of expensive services that will work to clean up Internet searches of your name, or at least make it harder to find some of that stuff.)

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the first blogora page

Submitted by Jim Aune on March 25, 2009 - 2:14pm.

When rhosa, tri-delt, and I were young and foolish:

http://web.archive.org/web/20041109013202/http://rsa.cwrl.utexas.edu/

now we are mature

Submitted by rhosa (not verified) on March 25, 2009 - 3:10pm.

and

those were days of roses
poetry and prose
and martha all i had was you and all you had was me

there was no tomorrow
we packed away our sorrows
and we saved them for a rainy day

(thanks for sending me into howls of tom waits)

(thanks also to star lady jessica sheffield for designing the first blogora logo-a-gogo and for being -- am i wrong again? -- the first grad student blogoragger)

i think my favorite early page is one of the "The Blogora itself" comments pages. good stuff, hilts.