September 17, 2001

10:42 AM

Help create a historical record of web sites about the attacks.The Library of Congress and others want to create "a solid historical record of this time". They particularly want to find sites and blogs belonging to individuals. They're asking you to put a little "note this" linklet in your browser toolbar (like blogger's "blog this!") and click it when you see a blog or other site that has anything to do with the attacks. They'll archive it. I think this is a great idea and I know they'll need a lot of help from people like us to carry it through.
posted by jill (3 comments total)

The link should actually be http://www.webarchivist.org. For some reason or another the link didn't work for me without the 'www.'
posted by whatevrnvrmind at 11:37 AM on September 17, 2001

If you want to make a copy of the web as it existed at a single point in time, spiders have been written, there are some good ones. (Talk to the folks at google.com.)

OTOH, if one has the more sinister purpose of tracking people's web surfing for commercial purposes, software has been written to do that, too. Although there's no conceivable reason for anyone to install it. It's called spyware.

Alternative strategies that are also very helpful:
[...]
Download Alexa – every site you visit will eventually wind up in the Internet Archive.

Not a good idea. At all.
posted by swell at 12:43 PM on September 17, 2001

Good idea, and the bookmarklet idea is cool. Is that our own MrMoonPie's doing?

Swell, keep in mind the source before you wave the privacy flag. There's no evidence they're tracking individuals; the choice to submit remains entirely under the control of the submitter. And spiders would have a LOT of spidering to do to find the right stuff. They're asking for us to point out the good stuff to them for a particular purpose. Only the government imprimatur makes this any different from what bloggers and slashdotters do as a matter of course.
posted by dhartung at 4:08 PM on September 17, 2001