The Internet Archive

INFO SCIENCE: Check out Brewster Kahle - Universal Access to All Knowledge, a great new lecture posted on IT Conversations. I just listened to it while cleaning the bathroom (finally!), and it's a very engaging talk.

Brewster Kahle is the founder of the Internet Archive. Until listening to this talk I had no idea the people at Archive were as busy as they are; there are some interesting features in the pipeline. In fact, exploring the Archive might temporarily distract me from that other most exciting .org project, Wikipedia.

Two of the many things I took away from the talk:

• I like his simple framework for analyzing new technology:
  
  
  • Should we (In this case, should we try and collect much of the world's information for future generations?)
  • Can we (Is it logistically possible?)
  • May we (Will congress and content providers (RIAA, etc.) allow it?)
  • Will we
  
  
• DjVu is a cool technology that "allows the distribution on the Internet of very high resolution images of scanned documents, digital documents, and photographs. DjVu allows content developers to scan high-resolution color pages of books, magazines, catalogs, manuals, newspapers, historical or ancient documents, and make them available on the Web."


• Phone companies suck. While most tech works by Moore's Law, bandwidth per dollar spent today is about the same as it was in 2000.