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sale of Deja.com Usenet archive



"It's a massive database stuffed with reams of human conversation that is rummaged daily by Internet
users worldwide. It's loaded with 500 million postings in 35,000 discussion forums. In five years, its
digital waist-size has ballooned to over 1.5 terabytes ?- or 1,500 gigabytes.   It is the Usenet
archive of Deja.com -- and its fate is now in question because it is about to be sold."

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,39622,00.html

The ongoing preservation of this 5-year collection of online correspondence has been called into
question.

Should this concern us as a possible loss of public access to an important part of the Internet's
social history, or should we just consider it the market's way of telling us that the collection isn't
really worth keeping?

"The interest (in Usenet content) falls off very quickly with time as you start going back into it,"
[Henry] Spencer said. "So it's difficult to justify putting significant amounts of money into
preserving the old stuff that hardly anybody -- except maybe the few enthusiastic historians -- ever
looks at."

[snip]

"It's a real shame to see that stuff go," Spencer said. "Not because it's of immense, immediate
practical value, but because I think in some areas it sheds a fair bit of light on how some of this
culture developed -- the cultural history of computer networking.  A lot of it is already gone for
good. The more of it we can preserve the better."

You may also have seen a message I sent a while back about the controversy surrounding the
manipulation for commercial purposes of links within messages stored in the Usenet archive
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,37715,00.html

=======================================================
 Cal Lee
 University of Michigan
 School of Information
 Phone: 734-647-0505
 http://www-personal.si.umich.edu/~calz/
 "Those who forget the past are condemned to reload it."
                        - Nick Montfort, July 2000

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