The archiving at the wayback machine is only done once every few months, so it's very coarse. There's a general article on it from the BBC at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2000/dot_life/1651557.stm , and there's a lot of bits on http://www.archive.org/ itself. Try this google search: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22wayback+machine%22+archive.org&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&start=10&sa=N

(if anyone's not sure what I'm on about, copy the text from the http:// to just before the space, paste it into the address bar of your browser, and press return).

Thanks for the comments on my site. I get something under a quarter of a million hits a year. This sounds really impressive, until you remember most people will look for a poet called Dylan, or a Dylan who's got something to do with music, and get my site instead. Erm...

---------- Original Message -------------
Subject: Re: Poetry and the Internet
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2004 14:51:24 +0000
From: ian davidson <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]


I certianly am interested and many thanks for this Dylan. It's an impressive
website.

I was also interested in what you were saying about work being archived. Is
there anywhere I can find out more about this? One of the ideas I've been
exploring is the way that the internet doesn't provide a stable or
definitive version of a text and that texts can get changed or disappear.
The archiving process suggests that there may be various versions, all
accessible, which mirrors the process of book publication.

I suppose in some ways you shouldn't be surprised that you get more hits for
music than poetry. There are more cds of music sold each week than books of
poetry.

Thanks again

Ian


>From: Dylan Harris <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: Dylan Harris <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Poetry and the Internet
>Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2004 08:27:21 -0000
>
>I find the Internet does challenge aspects of poetry availability. To
>explain this, I need to offer some background. I'm not sure if you'll be
>interested in the perspective of an individual poetry site webmaster, but,
>well...
>
>My site is http://dylanharris.org/ , currently in it's the third major
>version. I grabbed the URL, not for egotistical reasons, but because
>someone else had registered dylanharris.com, someone who's name was neither
>dylan nor harris. I've tried to make my site appear distinctive, if a
>little uncompromising. It's got some technical features that I'd be happy
>to bore you with off-list.
>
>The site is dynamic, not so much televisual movement, rather constant
>revision. I upload versions of works as they develop. You only get the
>current, although I do keep the revision history offline in a version
>control database.
>
>When I first decided to put my work up on a website back in the middle 90s,
>the great majority of poetry on the net would have embarrassed vanity
>publishers. There were difficult to find exceptions, such as Michael
>Youth's "Of A Fiery Mind" ( http://home.sprynet.com/~myouth/fierym~1.htm,
>link unreliable )---a Jan Sandstrom (
>http://www.jansandstrom.com/recordings.html ) of American poetry.
>
>The web infrastructure was rapidly evolving. At the time, the dominant
>indexing engine was Yahoo, who reputedly employed people to look at sites
>and index them. The early version of my site got indexed for both
>photography and poetry, which was quite an achievement. Another, more
>egalitarian approach, was the webring ( http://www.webring.org/ ), where
>groups of people got together and connected their sites together. Most
>poetry webrings lacked editorial control and contained drivel, but there
>are so many rings you can find the occasional sophisticated content. I'm
>very glad online magazines have appeared and developed.
>
>As the web evolved, there were some very significant changes from my
>perspective as an online poet. In particular, the way-back machine (
>http://www.archive.org/ ) which is the US's Library Of Congress Internet
>Archive, and the google search engine's cache, both mean that a site, if
>indexed, can be found and explored long after it's been taken down. Once a
>poem is on the net, it is there for anyone to see, forever (unless you go
>through the American courts and take out the appropriate injunction). You
>cannot "unpublish" your poetry just by taking a site down. The web is not
>ephemeral.
>
>Well, this isn't quite true. I'm not sure how long Google keeps it's cache,
>but I don't believe it's forever. The Way-Back machine got overwhelmed by
>the growth of the web, and now restricts itself to US sites, and reputedly
>misses much. Other national internet archives are apparently in various
>stages of construction.
>
>If a site is potentially available to everyone forever, it's daft to
>pretend otherwise. If I put my poetry up on my website, and the site gets
>indexed or archived, then I've lost control of the unavailability of my
>work. What do I lose by doing this? Well, I'm not exactly an overwhelmingly
>published poet, unlike most of you guys. Even if I were published, I doubt,
>somehow, I would gain exceptional riches from the privilege (please, please
>tell me I'm wrong). So, actually, I don't really lose anything.
>
>So what I've done is copyleft all my work on my site, using a Creative
>Commons Licence ( http://www.creativecommons.org/ ). This gives other
>people the right to copy my work, to make derivatives of it, and even to
>commercially exploit it, provided they preserve these rights and attribute
>me as appropriate. I do have deeper reasons for doing this, such as hinted
>in http://dylanharris.org/poetry/early0s/copyleft.html . It's akin to an
>artistic version of GNU's GPL ( http://www.gnu.org/ ), the licence that
>pins the ethos of Linux, and the Internet's software infrastructure. I do
>wonder whether this licence, and it's implied opportunity for uncontrolled
>collaboration and derivation, might have interesting consequences---the GPL
>certainly did. I'd like to explore this more.
>
>Having said all this, it's not the poetry that gets the hits on my site.
>I've committed photography in the past, including erotica, so I expected
>those photographs to dominate traffic. They did once.
>
>Many years ago, I knocked out some music, on a Commodore Amiga. I've put
>those tracks up too. They are technically poor quality---I'm not commenting
>on their artistic value---so I couldn't charge for them. But they are
>dominating my site traffic, especially
>http://dylanharris.org/music/walk/rock.mp3 . This has rather surprised me.
>But, I'll be honest, I'm getting sufficient traffic now, without any
>promotion, to make me wonder whether I should approach the lunatic fringe
>of the recording industry.
>
>I don't get many hits for my poetry. I believe this is because I have no
>name, no one's going to look for my work specifically. Many of the people
>on this list are collected, people online around the world are more likely
>to look for them, they would get more interest. But whether the potential
>interest is worth the consequences, particularly the loss of control of
>poems published online, that is something for them.
>--
>This mailbox uses greylisting, a technique to impose makework on spammers.
>If messages sent here bounce, please resend them after at least 5 minutes.
>
>dylanharris.org

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