In light of recent revelations about Caz & the Hack, perhaps we should have been a bit less willing to accede to an archival request from the National Library of Australia, but we have. That means this site is now archived electronically in the library’s ‘PANDORA‘ archive.
We’re not sure how regularly this is likely to take place (there’s only one update so far), but it does mean that - along with our musings - all your pearls of wisdom are recorded on a really robust server independent of the Ozblogistan server (Jacques’ hosting operation), presumably for all time. Quite a few other ozblogs are also stored in the archive, and I suspect the library people will track down those they haven’t got in the database in due course.
As Caz and the Hack discovered, Pandora (and the internet generally) has a degree of stickiness, even after some time has elapsed. People do remember, for good or ill, and go hunting on your pixel trail if they’ve got a mind to do so. I’m not one of the types who thinks that people should be held to account over every intemperate blog post or comment they’ve ever made - and I resented it enormously when one LP writer I admired was chased away from blogging thanks to a faction fight in the ALP - but I do think the internet’s surprising degree of permanence is as good a reason as any to be pleasant peeps on the intertubes.
5 Comments
PANDORA will generally visit once or twice in a year, depending on what’s happening.
It’s good company — a real who’s who of the ’sphere is archived by PANDORA.
I was rather tickled, actually.
One thing that’s a little confusing is that the National Library and the National Archives seem to have different programs for archiving. The NLA have PANDAS and the NAA have one called Xena.
Personally what I’d like is the ability to produce my own archival lumps on demand. The NLA archiving is very aggressive in the way it goes over the site, presumably because they want to try and get timely snapshot.
Archives generated by the server would be a lot more efficient I suspect. It could also be compressed, further reducing overhead.
They must have trouble storing everything from some of the really big blogs that have been going for ages. I seem to remember a note on both the LP & Troppo archives to the effect that they couldn’t ‘capture’ the whole site.
That’ll be more to do with broken links and wordpress errors than anything like diskspace.
A quick check of the troppo server shows the database and web directory coming to a grand total of 247Mb. Pretty small potatoes, really. Text doesn’t really take that much space.
In fact the archive size would be smaller because of database overhead (usually reckoned as 3x ‘actual’ data size) and the fact that you could compress it a fair amount. So say something like 130-140Mb altogether.