November 12, 2001– Newsletter #156

Greetings, Weekend Silicon Warriors,

This is newsletter 156. That’s three times 52. I guess
that means that this is my three-year anniversary of
writing this “Goodies to Go” newsletter. In light of that, I
just may have an announcement for you next week.

Did you hear…

It seems that e-commerce will easily make it though the
slow upcoming holiday season. Forrester Research
polled 9000 buyers and found that the online buying
demographic is pretty much insulated from the economic
climate and are continuing to buy online. I don’t know
that I am insulated from the economic climate, but I made
two online purchases last week.

Pizza Hut is beginning to bother me every time I go to
Yahoo. If you haven’t seen it, the takeover, active ad has
a pizza on a wooden peel (that’s the spatula that lifts the
pizza out of the oven) popping through the page and then
flying over to a large ad. The ad campaign is handing out
online coupons if you follow the flying pie and click.

Have you bought Windows XP? In the first three days of
sales the operating system outsold its predecessor
Windows ME but fell short of the sales mark set by
Windows 98.
Total sales were around 300,000. I guess we prefer our
operating systems with numbers rather than letters
although I do like the commercials for XP. I’m sure
Madonna likes them too, but for a much more lucrative
reason.

Now on to today’s topic…

OK, so there’s this guy. His name is Brewster Kahle and
he claims to have the next greatest idea on the Web.

Catalogue everything.

Kahle addressed a small group of librarians and
academics at the UC-Berkeley’s Bancroft Library on
October 24th claiming that he was going to undertake a
task not seen since the Greeks attempted to accumulate
all the knowledge in the world.

Uh-huh.

That late October meeting of the minds was the launch
party for a Web site named, “The Internet Archive
Wayback Machine.” It claims to contain a record of,
“The way the Web used to be.” The site’s homepage at
http://web.archive.org/ states that you can search, “100
terabytes and 10 billion web pages archived from 1996 to
the present.”

Uh-huh. Right.

Of course I’m just going to have to trying this out. Let’s
see, what will I put in? Hmmm. I need to pick a Web
site. Uh…I have it! How about HTML Goodies? Since
I wrote it, I know what it looked like and I know how it
has evolved.

Surely they won’t have the site all the way back into
1997. Let’s just test this thing out.

Oh…wow.

I’m floored. It has been so long since I was floored, but I
am floored. It’s 6:30AM on Thursday, November 8th,
2001 and I am looking at the homepage I wrote and
posted on December 24th, 1997.

This is before Internet.com, before Earthweb, and only
slightly after the site even accepted advertising. A
company called “Wolverine Web Productions”
represented my advertising. This is when I would scan
pictures for a buck a scan and digitize video for a buck a
second. I would capture just a single frame for a buck
and a half. JavaGoodies.com still existed. I know all of
this because there it is…and the links work.

The original Goodies rate card is posted. You could have
bought the site for a $25 CPM back when it boasted a
seven-page average look-see by tons of original users.

Now I’m looking at the original Yahoo.com page from
October 7th, 1996.

Now I’m looking at AOL from December 1996.

Now I’m looking at Ebay from July of 1997.

Pets.com still exists here. A friend’s dead site,
Bookface.com, still lives here. Ivillage.com is staring
back at me.

Oh…wow.

When you go, make a point of visiting the “Web
Pioneers” section and going back in time. I had to tell my
self to stop or I would have been late for work, where
I’ll most likely kill a couple hours surfing the site again.

About the only downfall is that it appears to require the
archived element to be a domain unto itself. I attempted
to look up HTML Goodies’ original address at bgsu.com
and couldn’t get a hit. There were also sporadic links that
returned a 404 error, but that’s to be expected with such a
large undertaking. Also, pages that are password
protected cannot be archived.

Kahle stated that many sites, at first, refused to be
archived due to copyright concerns. However, many are
changing their minds when the concept of the site is
explained to them. Take a look. Do you see any
advertising? I don’t. Not yet at least. It appears that the
site truly wants to be a repository for history and not a
money making machine.

I’m hopeful that sites will understand the concept and
will let some copyright concerns slide. The idea seems
too pure and too well constructed to be an under-handed
attempt to make money off of another’s work.

Visit the site. Search around. Get a sense of history. See
where these Internet monsters came from and how poorly
we all designed right at the beginning.

It’s an eye-opener. Let me tell you.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

That’s that. Thanks for reading. See you next week with
an announcement.

Joe Burns, Ph.D.

And remember: Here’s a fact to pull out while you’re
watching football…American football. Do you know
why each attempt is called a “down?” It stems from the
first versions of the game back in the late 1800s. When a
player hit the ground either by tackle, falling, of his own
accord, he would yell “down.” That meant the play was
over and the other team was barred from piling on. The
name stuck.

Back then the game was really just a more rule-laden
version of Rugby. You have two men to thank for
transforming football into what you see today. It was
Walter Chauncy Camp who set up the rules for 11-man
teams, the quarterback, a line of scrimmage, and the rule
that a team must surrender the ball if they do not advance
a specific number of yards in a set number of downs.
Today it’s ten yards in four downs, but back then the
numbers changed almost week to week.

Knute Rockne is the second man you football fans should
be thanking. He popularized the forward pass, and
invented the “Platoon system.” That’s the concept of
having set groupings of players that come off and on the
field as a platoon. Think offense and defense.