Web history: do you care?
I'm at the 2007 World Wide Web conference in Banff Canada this week. I gave a tutorial on digital identity yesterday. This morning, I went to a session on Web Science as a discipline. Right now I'm sitting in a session in the Web history track.
The presentations in this session are about the World Wide Web History Center, an organization with the aim of preserving the history of the Web. Some of this is preserving the actual Web sites themselves, but there are other things as well, like Jeeves.
Jeeves, the AskJeeves mascot came to WWW2007 to promote Web history
The Web History Center, like it's subject, is decentralized--it's hosted at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA as well as Indiana, the UK, and Switzerland. The center believes that the need to preserve the history of the ongoing development of the Web is critical. The center is concerned that because of it's electronic nature, the history of the Web is disappearing and our digital heritage is at risk. What do you think?
[poll id=68]I find the history of the Web fascinating in the same way I find the 60's and 70's fascinating--I lived through it, associate it with a more carefree time, and there's a certain amount of nostalgia surrounding it for me.