I can still access http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ I can't currently access the article at https://lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2017/07/21/a-million-squand... [Insert joke about irony here.]
I think the Harvard link is down due to traffic.
The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact
81–90 of 167 posts
Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact
#82My first web page ever is in there. I'm not sure how special of a thing that is I don't know how many icons are involved. Also I wonder how Word got around to me about things like this in the days of MySpace and yahoo as my internet.
Fark, Slashdot, TheRegister, etc.
News aggregation sites have been around for awhile.
Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see how the article suggests that. The article is using the Million Dollar Homepage as an example to draw attention to interesting things about internet history, including the complexity of archiving internet content. The page itself isn't being attacked, but rather used to exemplify a broader concern. The article uses the Million Dollar Home Page as an example of an interesting historical artifact that tells…
that's beautiful and all, but nothing works like that. a page is lots of things. the html and js can be preserved like an artifact in a museum, ok. but the rest, the server hosting it, its connection to the internet, it being http only, etc... has to be preserved like architectural works. yes, some building facade migth still look like it was build in the 1800, but everything in it is updated to conform to fire code,…
The article does not purport to have a solution to this problem. It is a contribution to an ongoing effort to describe the problem and understand it so that solutions may be pursued.
Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact
#84I actually purchased a $300 spot on this. I did get quite a few clicks, but very low-quality traffic. Mostly, I got lots of offers from copycat sites to join their "billion dollar" homepage or whatnot. It's crazy how many copycats came out, very unoriginal thinking going on.
I remember that time - there were even people trying to sell guides purporting to teach people how to set up their own million-dollar homepage!
s/million-dollar homepage/altcoin/g
Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact
#85The Million Dollar Homepage is not decaying (it is still serving its million dollar purpose) - it is the Web itself that has decayed. The brittleness of URIs is on full display. "Cool URLs don't change," but most of these URLs were never cool: they had to rent coolness from Internet cool kid Alex Tew.
The "future" of the web has become Google as the URL and address bar and Facebook has become the content.
Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact
#86Oh wow, I remember that. 1 million pixels for only a dollar each! That guy made a nice bundle off the idea, it got picked up and hyped by the media so much I'm sure the companies that bought in got some ROI, or at least some publicity. Such was the extent of the dot com bubble that this sort of nonsense could happen and everyone cheered...
I don't think 2005 would be considered part of the dot com bubble.
Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact
#87Gwern has a good summary of the research in this: https://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs >In a 2003 experiment, Fetterly et al. discovered that about one link out of every 200 disappeared each week from the Internet. McCown et al 2005 discovered that half of the URLs cited in D-Lib Magazine articles were no longer accessible 10 years after publication [the irony!], and other studies have shown link rot in academic li…
There's an automatic system on Wikipedia now which attempts to rescue dead links by finding the page in the Internet Archive and updating the Wikipedia page accordingly.
What about personal caches?
I know that few people likely keep locally saved Web pages in near line accessibility. But if you only build the tool, I would happily mount the nearly 5 terabytes of ULTRASCSI drives I've got in storage, which were largely Squid cache snapshots, from my office WAN proxy box.
Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
that's beautiful and all, but nothing works like that. a page is lots of things. the html and js can be preserved like an artifact in a museum, ok. but the rest, the server hosting it, its connection to the internet, it being http only, etc... has to be preserved like architectural works. yes, some building facade migth still look like it was build in the 1800, but everything in it is updated to conform to fire code,…
The article does not purport to have a solution to this problem. It is a contribution to an ongoing effort to describe the problem and understand it so that solutions may be pursued.
But, and I feel like I'm going to get a proverbial reprimand for asking the obvious, but why, in all this time, has no solution been proposed?
Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact
#89I can still access http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ I can't currently access the article at https://lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2017/07/21/a-million-squand... [Insert joke about irony here.]
I think the Harvard link is down due to traffic.
I'm sure the Million Dollar Homepage is getting a lot of traffic right now too
Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact
#90Gwern has a good summary of the research in this: https://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs >In a 2003 experiment, Fetterly et al. discovered that about one link out of every 200 disappeared each week from the Internet. McCown et al 2005 discovered that half of the URLs cited in D-Lib Magazine articles were no longer accessible 10 years after publication [the irony!], and other studies have shown link rot in academic li…
I don't create web pages often, but whenever I link to something, I always generate a backup PDF.