3 ms·

The problem is, the internet archive is great at storing data, not not the best at making that data discoverable, viewable. A partnership like this makes quite

by johtso 5y ago

The problem is, the internet archive is great at storing data, not not the best at making that data discoverable, viewable. A partnership like this makes quite a bit of sense.

ineedasername 5y ago
It seems like there'd be a lot of volunteers to help with building their own. On that scale, I'm not sure if/which FOSS option might be suited. But the sheer technical challenge of scaling a system to > 100 petabytes along with a compelling mission would attract a lot of talent. Heck, if they'd just worked with Flickr long enough to extract the metadata created surrounding these images so that all that effort wouldn't be lost then I bet there would be ample volunteers just to reimplement a way of utilizing it. To discard all that work... I can only.hope that no actual data is lost and they will be able to do something with it in the future.
- exolymph 5y ago
  Uncoordinated volunteers are worse than useless, sadly.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Why would it be uncoordinated? Volunteers work for FOSS after all, and if the work for IA was also under a FOSS license I don't see why it couldn't work. And IA is high profile enough to attract really talented people from the FOSS community that already understand how to work under that paradigm.
- db48x 5y ago
  You can already do this without building a huge storage system or needing any sort of permission from the Internet Archive. Anyone can upload material to IA, and anything on IA can be embedded into other webpages. You can dream up the ideal user interface and build it without needing any permission or cooperation from IA.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Sure, but the point is to have IA be the owner of an archive w/ a good, well performing UI/UX. Because: I might build an excellent interface to IA's millions of images, so good that it becomes the default way of viewing them. Countless bookmarks and links from other sites are published against the material through my site. But then one day I decide it's just not working out anymore and I pack it all up. I call this imaginary system Fleckr. I'm not saying people shouldn't build what they want in this way, but IA shouldn't rely on other services to host anything that it wants to stick around. They appear to have done that with Flickr, because Flickr had a good system, but now it's all dust. Or, if not dust, it will require a complete system to be built to do something similar, migrating user contributions (if they were salvageable) to this new system. I'm saying this new system should be owned & operated by IA. Building it w/ volunteer work under a FOSS license like many other large projects seems a reasonable option.

by johtso 5y ago

The problem is, the internet archive is great at storing data, not not the best at making that data discoverable, viewable. A partnership like this makes quite a bit of sense.

ineedasername 5y ago

It seems like there'd be a lot of volunteers to help with building their own. On that scale, I'm not sure if/which FOSS option might be suited. But the sheer technical challenge of scaling a system to > 100 petabytes along with a compelling mission would attract a lot of talent. Heck, if they'd just worked with Flickr long enough to extract the metadata created surrounding these images so that all that effort wouldn't be lost then I bet there would be ample volunteers just to reimplement a way of utilizing it. To discard all that work... I can only.hope that no actual data is lost and they will be able to do something with it in the future.

exolymph 5y ago
Uncoordinated volunteers are worse than useless, sadly.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Why would it be uncoordinated? Volunteers work for FOSS after all, and if the work for IA was also under a FOSS license I don't see why it couldn't work. And IA is high profile enough to attract really talented people from the FOSS community that already understand how to work under that paradigm.
db48x 5y ago
You can already do this without building a huge storage system or needing any sort of permission from the Internet Archive. Anyone can upload material to IA, and anything on IA can be embedded into other webpages. You can dream up the ideal user interface and build it without needing any permission or cooperation from IA.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Sure, but the point is to have IA be the owner of an archive w/ a good, well performing UI/UX. Because: I might build an excellent interface to IA's millions of images, so good that it becomes the default way of viewing them. Countless bookmarks and links from other sites are published against the material through my site. But then one day I decide it's just not working out anymore and I pack it all up. I call this imaginary system Fleckr. I'm not saying people shouldn't build what they want in this way, but IA shouldn't rely on other services to host anything that it wants to stick around. They appear to have done that with Flickr, because Flickr had a good system, but now it's all dust. Or, if not dust, it will require a complete system to be built to do something similar, migrating user contributions (if they were salvageable) to this new system. I'm saying this new system should be owned & operated by IA. Building it w/ volunteer work under a FOSS license like many other large projects seems a reasonable option.