@Derek K. Miller: I`m really sorry !

@Zeldman: Thank you for this post !

@Jay is there even such a thing as a “static” version of a site any
more? Ajax, photos from Flickr, videos embedded from YouTube, etc
etc…

I think if we are looking to do this realistically on a large scale, we need to accept that there are limitations. Saving a web page in its entirety, with all the links still pointing to the same places and everything appearing in the same context as the day it was published, isn’t realistically possible at the moment on a very large scale.

But just because we don’t have the original moon landing tapes doesn’t mean we didn’t manage to save the gist of it.

I don’t think we need to look for a silver bullet. Nobody set up a central repository for every book, artwork or piece of music ever created. We just saved what we could, where we could, how we could, and ended up with the pretty decent collection we have today. So let’s just start preserving what we can.

My suggestion: A print journal.
Right now I can think of 5 or 10 blog posts from the last month or so that have been very influential, but now they’ve disappeared down my feed reader somewhere and I’ll most likely never look at them again.

What if we had a regular magazine to publish those articles in print form, with the author’s permission, to survive for as long as anything else in print (i.e. a long time.)

If we want to preserve the design we could basically take a screenshot of a page and print it.
Not worried about the design? Just print the article text and images.
Video or audio required to get the full experience? Throw it on a CD and include it with every issue.
We could even get creative with the format (rather than a normal magazine, how about preserving the format and printing the whole thing on one long scroll!)

Some issues:
People would need to buy the thing.
It doesn’t need to make money, just cover the costs of printing and freight. I’d subscribe. Hopefully someone else would. There are enough universities teaching web design now to warrant an industry journal subscription, just like they have in every other area of academia.

You can’t replicate the full web page experience on paper.
True, but you can preserve the gist of the content. Which is better than nothing at all.

There’s too much content out there to preserve this way.
True, but again, it’s better than preserving nothing at all. We don’t have every single piece of writing from 2000 years ago, but we do have some of the things that people back then thought most important to preserve and reproduce.

Who gets to choose what’s printed?
I don’t know. Maybe it’s purely a voting thing, maybe it’s up to a committee of industry heavyweights, maybe it’s up to a single editor. Not everyone will be happy, but Nature doesn’t publish every single science project on the planet. That doesn’t make it any less valuable.

Like I said, this isn’t a silver bullet, but I think it could be a start. Anyone keen to work on this?

(Apologies for the novel of a comment, Jeffrey)

I would assume that other national libraries do the same?

Not in America, anyway. :(

Apart from that at least the German National Library has a program to archive digital material one can actively contribute to, I would assume that other national libraries do the same?

Mythic Beasts Ltd., his hosting provider and ISP, where most of MySociety and ORG are still based, undertook to keep the entirety of his work online. This isn’t a generic solution, though; he started Mythic Beasts…

Or…

It’s all part of the wireless future with everyone having their own data hub in the household. Computers and such will no longer hold data but a central ‘server’ of information, if you will, will become the next digital revolution. Tie this in with cross/backward compatible file formats and the world will truely be connected…

Thank you.

And, I’m so sorry.