ACMQueue has published a nice interview with Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle. Kahle discusses a number of topics interesting to those of us int he information management world, mostly revolving around the social, legal, and technical issues of archiving the world's collected knowledge.
Social:
I've grown up within this idea that universal education is good, and that people, if they can build on the works of others, achieve more. But this approach is not always in favor. Not all times in history encourage open societies and open knowledge.
Legal:
What the music and movie guys are doing, I can't tell you. I have not worked with many businesspeople who want to spend much time lobbying or in court.
Technical:
That gets about 8 million hits a day, or about 100 hits per second. That's running on this Linux cluster where there's no Cisco, no Oracle, no Sun, no special anything. Everything is built out of bricks, along the Jim Gray [head of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center] model. We do get help from people at IBM Almaden, HP Labs, Microsoft Labs—all helping to build these petabyte systems.
A side note the folks at ACMQueue: If you must break articles up across multiple pages, the printer-friendly format option should join them back together into one big document. If you did this, I could hit print once, rather than going to each page, then choosing printer-friendly, then hitting print. Doing this six times wasn't exactly a happy user experience.
Continuing the rant: all of us involved in putting content up on the web need to realize that people aren't necessarily going to read the content on-screen. I'll often print out longer articles and read them on the bus ride home. I guess lots of folks have figured out how to present content in a screen and printer-friendly fashion, so when I hit a site that doesn't do this well, it really stands out.
Okay, enough of that. Go read the interview.
Posted by Karl
July 10, 2004 09:41 AM