Universal Access to All Knowledge

Does the idea of universal access to all human knowledge--all books, every sound recording, every video or movie, everything... interest you? If so, then you check out Brewster Khale's talk about the Internet Archive on itconversations.com. You can stream or download the audio. Then checkout the Internet Archive itself: http://archive.org. Brewster still has a long way to go and can't do it without more help, but he is doing it. For example, India has volunteered to scan 100,000 books that are out of copyright simply because they need to educate their 1+ billion people. In return, the text of the books will soon be available on the Internet Archive. There is overlap and mutual cross-sharing here with the Million Book Project and Project Gutenberg. For example, here's a section from Project Gutenberg's collection, Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven, housed on archive.org

The Wayback Machine is particularly cool because you can view what websites looked like in the past, a virtual time machine. Here's a link to a snapshot page from June 7, 1997 showing that I was a member of the World Wide Web Internet Interest Group at the University of Arkansas. (I had already graduated by then but was a member for the previous years.) Unfortunately, (and the reason I looked this up in the first place) the link to my old college homepage doesn't work. It wasn't indexed. Ah well... Brewster Khale was the founder of Alexa which is where this historical data comes from (the Internet Archive gets Alexa's data with a six-month time delay for archiving purposes) and is also, having sold Alexa to Amazon a few years ago, where Brewster gets his money for financing the archiving to this point.