Posts tagged “archive”

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • [from julienorvaisas] A Memory of Webs Past [IEEE Spectrum] – [The French National Library is updating their technical ability to archive absolutely everything ever published.] "We have a lot of so-called crap, and we're happy about that," says Illien, an archivist. His colleagues in other countries might turn up their noses at hard-core porn, advertisements, and obscure newsletters, but not Illien. "In a hundred years, what's totally irrelevant or dirty today will end up becoming of extreme interest to historians." The archivists here aren't after just printed material; they're preserving the electronic, too. It's his daunting task to archive French Web sites—all of them, in all their evanescent, constantly changing, and multimedia splendor. "I'm convinced the Web as we know it will be gone in a few years' time. What we're doing in this library is trying to capture a trace of it." Illien sees himself as a steward of an ancient tradition; he believes he is helping pioneer a revolution in the way society documents what it does and how it thinks.

The FreshMeat archives

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From 2001 to 2005, FreshMeat was a semi-regular email column about the relationships between business, culture, technology, products, consumers, and so on. As this blog found its voice, it gradually replaced FreshMeat as our outlet for the same sort of commentary.

This is a jump page for archived FreshMeat issues.

4/29/05 – Push to Talk
1/04/05 – Total Recall
7/26/04 – License to Shill
4/05/04 – The More The Merrier
12/23/03 – Pun Americana
6/30/03 – Livin’ La Vida Luxa
5/21/03 – The Houses of the Wholly
2/18/03 – She Blinded Me With Silence
11/07/02 – American Girl, Mama Let Me Be
8/05/02 – Free Agent Irritation
4/06/02 – Get Down Off the Shelf
1/16/02 – The Name of the Game is the Name
12/07/01 – Why The Cleaning Lady Won’t Do Windows
11/21/01 – A Load On Their Mind
11/09/01 – Beaming Up Scotty
10/30/01 – Got Zeitgeist?
10/04/01 – Everyone Remembers Their First Time
9/28/01 – If I Had A Hammer…Would Everything Look Like A Nail?
9/18/01 – Take Pictures, Last Longer!
9/04/01 – Cleaning Up On Aisle 5
8/27/01 – Reading FreshMeat Declared Safe!
8/17/01 – We Love to See You Smile?
8/09/01 – Every Product Tells a Story (Don’t It?)
8/01/01 – Blue Hawaii, or Viva Las Vegas

Note: TurnSignals (PDF) – originally sent out by fax – was an antecedent to FreshMeat.

Snapshots of Cultural Phenomena, a blast from the past

turnsignalsman.jpg
If you recognize this little guy, you probably saw Turn Signals back when we put it out at GVO, at random times between 1995 to 2000.

I just acquired a missing issue and have updated the compilation/archive here (PDF link). Check it out! Last-century references to Grant McCracken, the inventor of ramen noodles, Don Norman, and gorillas…among others.

Turn Signals…in a time before blogging, we used to take interesting articles from the paper and photocopy ’em, highlight interesting parts and put them in each other’s mailboxes. Someone suggested we turn this into something for our clients, and so we (in conjunction with a graphic design firm) created the brand, name, identity and so on. We took stories from the press, but rewrote them in a pithy/wry voice.

In its earliest days, Turn Signals was sent out by fax. We used a fax-merge program on a Mac and it would sit and dial and redial for days upon end. We didn’t have the greatest database, ended up calling people at home in the middle of the night with a fax tone. It was not a good system, but there was something about the push, the paper version. We heard stories back bout it being posted in the bathroom or left on coffee tables. Or people would fax us back with a scribbled note, or a request to be added to the distribution. We probably had a stronger identity, visually and voice, than the company did, overall. I don’t think we ever fully leveraged that, though.

Eventually we went to PDF as an email attachment. It was opt-out, which I think went with the times, although maybe we’d want to take a different approach now.

usenet archives

You may have heard that google has unleashed the USENET archives back to 1981. Here’s one of the earliest posts from me that I found. Another is here and one more here.

Groups I was active in during the 1990 to 1993 period include:

alt.folklore.urban
rec.arts.movies
alt.sex
alt.rock-n-roll
alt.tv.muppets
talk.bizarre (though for some reason, those posts aren’t showing up in Google. Although I did win #25 most frequent poster of the week in the USENET stats post, including 76% of those posts to talk.bizarre – so I’ve got “proof” just no evidence)

I found some early (and tame) flame wars, some morally indignant posts by me, many smart-ass posts, quite a few questions about who sang this or acted in that (and my own share of answers), and some real newbi-ism. And, the .signatures from back then – oy! Star Trek references abound…

Series

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