The team at the Internet Archive, responsible for Wayback Machine, ArchiveTeam, the TV News Archive, and many other projects, are true gems. I had the chance to meet Brewster and many others whilst last in San Francisco and their passion is infectious.
If anyone is interested, they have an open lunch on Fridays[1] where you get to see the church, the tech, and meet the team. Each team member and guest gives a few sentences about who they are and what they do, which really gives you a feel to how much work is going on under the covers.<p>I feel humanity will look back on this period -- lost diskettes, CDs, DVDs, game consoles, Betamax, VHS -- and lament the comparative black hole of information. Myspace history deleted with no warning, Justin.tv deleting history with only 8 days warning[2], ... and a million more examples. The Internet Archive are fighting that one bit at a time.<p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7826313" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7826313</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://twitter.com/internetarchive/status/315655572919828480" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/internetarchive/status/31565557291982848...</a>
A lot of people here are confusing the Archive Team with the Internet Archive. They are not the same. IA is more polite, they always respect robots.txt and they will sometimes remove data if you ask politely. AT are self-described "rogue archivists" and their motto is "we are going to rescue your shit".
I love the Wayback Machine, I wish they'd archive <i>all</i> pages though even those that don't wish to be archived.... keeping them away from public view until copyrights expire someday.
I love what the archive team does. I used their VM when the posterous backup effort was happening last year, and today I sent a link to my friend's now defunct posterous blog.<p>But I know that the owner of days posterous page had no intent on keeping the page a going concern, and was happy to see it disposed of. In light of the recent Google "right to be forgotten" ruling, will there come a day when the right to be forgotten will extend to archive.org?
All this great content and their website is designed in a way that discourages people to peruse it. They really need a re-design and "relaunch" of their brand to flaunt the great things that they're doing.