Dave Winer, the godfather of blogging, blogged last week:
“I’m really confused about what’s up with archive.org. As I reported on Tuesday, they clearly aren’t archiving this blog in any meaningful way. I write this blog with history in mind. I put things here and on the linkblog because I want to be sure historians in the future will find at least one link to this stuff. If archive.org isn’t backing it up, that’s a big problem. And it raises an even bigger question — what else aren’t they archiving? And how do they decide what to archive and not to archive? Do they run the JavaScript on a page to get a rendering? If not, there’s a huge amount of our knowledge that isn’t being recorded. Are they trying to be neutral or do their friends and people who donate get preferential treatment?”
Winer’s blog, Scripting, is one of the longest published blogs. His blog, and his thinking on citizen journalism, got me thinking of blogs for lawyers, almost twenty years ago.
What’s Archive.org (a/k/a The Wayback Machine)? From Wikipedia:
“The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web. It was founded by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit library based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows the user to go “back in time” and see how websites looked in the past. Its founders, Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, developed the Wayback Machine with the intention of providing “universal access to all knowledge” by preserving archived copies of defunct webpages.”
I’ve enjoyed sharing with friends and colleagues, via Arvive.org, what LexBlog and my previous company looked like on the net, years ago – as well as what my law firm website looked like, twenty-five years ago.
Winer’s viewpoints, tech writing and commentary are important and deserve to be archived for historical sake.
Likewise for credible law blogs, which chart development in the law, develop the law in and of itself and become a tremendous body of law for legal professionals, courts and the public.
But no one, until now, has dedicated themselves to archiving legal blogs. It’s possible. Unlike the general web, there’s a relatively small number of legal blogs, worldwide.
The only thing that limits archiving of law blogs is a willing to share. A willingness to let your law blog(s) be archived.
Ought to be easy as the goal of legal blogs is to be openly seen and shared.
We’ll see. LexBlog is in the process of archiving all legal blogs, without indexing the content vis a vis Google. Free and no work involved as to the bloggers.
So far we’re knocking on the door of larger firms and associations that bring access to a good number of law blogs, all at once.
I am personally involved in our reach outs and discussions, along with our Director of Community Development, Dorothy Coletta.
The only thing that limits all blogs from being archived is a “Yep, I’m in” from the legal bloggers.
I’ll keep you up to date on how we’re doing.
