A Million Squandered: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

In 2005, British student Alex Tew had a million-dollar idea. He launched www.MillionDollarHomepage.com, a website that presented initial visitors with nothing but a 1000×1000 canvas of blank pixels. At the cost of $1/pixel, visitors could permanently claim 10×10 blocks of pixels and populate them however they’d like. Pixel blocks could also be embedded with URLs and tooltip text of the buyer’s choosing.

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Warc.games at IIPC

At IIPC last week, Jack Cushman (LIL developer) and Ilya Kreymer (former LIL summer fellow) shared their work on security considerations for web archives, including warc.games, a sandbox for developers interested in exploring web archive security.

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IIPC 2017 – Day Two

Most of us attended the technical track on day two of IIPC 2017. (See also Matt’s post about the first day Andrew Jackson of the British Library expanded on his talk the previous day about workflows for ingesting and processing web archives. Nick Ruest and Ian Milligan described WALK, or Web Archiving for Longitudinal Knowledge, a system for aggregating Canadian web archives, generating derivative products, and making them accessible via search and visualizations. Gregory Wiedeman from University at Albany, SUNY, described his process for automating the creation of web archive records in ArchivesSpace and adding descriptive metadata using Archive-It APIs according to DACS (Describing Archives: A Content Standard).

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IIPC 2017 – Day One

Untitled It’s exciting to be back at IIPC this year to chat Perma.cc and web archives!

The conference kicked off at on Wednesday, June 14, at 9:00 with coffee, snacks, and familiar faces from all parts of the world. Web archives bring us together physically!

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LIL Talks: The 180-Degree Rule in Film

This week, Jack Cushman illustrated how hard it is to make a film, or rather, how easy it is to make a bad film. With the assistance of LIL staff and interns, he directed a tiny film of four lines in about four minutes, then used it as a counter-example. Any mistake can break the suspension of disbelief, and amateurs are likely to make many mistakes. Infelicities in shot selection, lighting, sound, wardrobe and makeup, set design, editing, color, and so on destroy the viewer’s immersion in the film.

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