when people look back at 2005

they will probably say things like, oh yeah that was the year that google went nuts with their maps

or that was the year that Tsar blew up

or that was the year that the Cubbies went all the way

or that was the year that the president admitted that hes totally super gay for karl rove.

but i think people are crazy if they dont look back at 2005 as being the year that video blogging hit the mainstream indirectly due to the influence of mr anti k. disestablishment

even though anti doesnt follow all the steps in the freevlog blog, it has a Lot of great tutorials on how to get your videos uploaded and hosted for free via archive.org

(anti, for all you blogspot users, has his vids hosted for free via blogger.)

currently the few vids that i have up are being hosted on archive.org, and i got a nice email from john who works at archive.org, home of the amazing Wayback Machine, and i asked him a few questions.

john was kind enough to email me back with some answers.

Q. How are you guys able to afford to host all these videos and the bandwidth? Are you owned by a huge corporation, or funded by a big foundation or something?

A. Most of our funding comes from foundations and companies that help with technology. Even the smallest donna always welcome

As a gift to the commons, we try to keep the costs down – free or cheap hw/sw/services, and a tiny staff of good people plus some great volunteers. We even incubated a company to make the cheapest storage clusters.

Q. Should people who use your service provide a courtesy link back to
archive.org?

A. I don’t think we care much about courtesy links. If it suits your style then sure whatever.

Two things that do matter are to keep your metadata clean as this is your collection we are storing/serving, and use links that will last forever.

good link
http://www.archive.org/download/BunnyMcIntoshinIslaVista/bunny_in_iv.avi

bad link
http://www.movies14.archive.org/1/movies/
BunnyMcIntoshinIslaVista/bunny_in_iv.avi

movies14/1 is a 250GB disk in a redbox made by Capricorn. They work great, but someday it will fail or retire and the primary locale for your item will migrate like a snake shedding.

Q. Is there a maximum amount of videos that you guys allow from each person?

A. Contribute whatever you got. We buy disks by the pallet. Though I’ve only got a few upload servers online. Shread em.

Q. Other than Anti, are there any other bloggers who are posting new vids once a day?

A. I have no idea who posts or what they post, others tend to the contributors, but our web crawls are larger than all uploads.

Q. Someone left me a comment that Google is now hosting videos. Is that competition if youre both free? Should we be loyal to you guys because of the incredible Wayback Machine or does it even matter?

A. Google is a friend. Ultimately they need to profit on contributors, we don’t.

sk smith likes cruddy! yay! + jeff jarvis mentioned me on tv! yay! + seliot at play

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