Social Machinery

If we could turn back the time ten years and browse trough the World Wide Web, probably we would be shocked by the organizational chaos, primitive design and the lack of functionalities from most of the sites. Internet was not always an organized place, linked, personalized and rich in Multimedia content. We have traveled a winding road to be where we are today : The Web 2.0

In order to illustrate, explore, archive and showcase the graphic artifacts found within earlier internet culture, artist Ryder Ripps founded the Internet Archaeology project.

The Internet Archaeology project is an amazing collaboration between artists, designers, and geeks from all over the globe aiming to organize and showcase our internet legacy.

The project is an important step to preserve our past, moreover when most of the sites that are shut down are left abandoned by their creators, running the risk of being eliminated by the webmaster who is hosting the content.

This is what happened in a big scale when Yahoo!, owner of Geocities decided to close the site in October this year. Geocities, used to be a site where people could host personal websites since 1994. At the moment of shutting down Geocities was hosting more than 38 millions sites, most of then created by ordinary people.

internetarchaeology.org