Simon Willison’s Weblog

Vintage Ad Browser. Fantastic. 100,000+ vintage advertisements scanned and organised by date and topic, going all the way back to the 1840s and covering every decade in between. An absolute gold mine.

# 6th January 2010, 9:04 am / ads, advertising, archive, design, history

tinyarchive.org. Blaine Cook’s archive of 301 and 302 redirects—needs to be automatically updated by a crawler for it to be really useful though.

# 13th April 2009, 9:57 pm / archive, tinyarchive, tinyurls, urls

TinyURL—Archiveteam. Excellent: the Internet Archive are crawling TinyURL (and hopefully other URL shortening services as well). The wiki page was created back in January. UPDATE from comments: Archiveteam are a separate organisation from the Internet Archive.

# 3rd April 2009, 11:11 pm / archive, archiveteam, internet-archive, tinyurl

Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse. Jason Scott on AOL’s closure of Hometown, their hosting service. In related news, Lycos just announced they are closing Tripod, which has been providing free hosting for 13 years.

# 18th January 2009, 8:48 am / aol, archive, eviction, hometown, jason-scott, lycos, tripod

ficlets memorial. Here’s a great argument for Creative Commons—AOL shut down Ficlets without providing an archive or export tool, but the license meant Ficlets co-creator Kevin Lawver could scrape and preserve all of the content anyway.

# 14th January 2009, 10:02 pm / aol, archive, creativecommons, data, ficlets, kevinlawver, preservation