The internet’s memory is short. Old videos get deleted out of embarrassment or legal necessity. Image hosts close their doors. Sites shrink, disappear, or are acquired by Yahoo! and dragged down into a cyber-dungeon to be tortured by Jeeves.
But most often, we all just forget about the things that once delighted us online, because they are formless virtual distractions, and it’s expensive to get browser tabs framed. Over at Kottke, Tim Carmody has proposed a solution: a crowdsourced treasury of the greatest stuff you’ve ever seen on the internet to counteract “the ephemerality of the web” and its inclination to surface “the very worst things that have just happened.” He’s collecting user submissions for the best videos, articles, and webcomics with this questionnaire.
So please, open up that portfolio of blue-chip links that you planned to pitch one by one to websites as news pieces until you had enough money to retire. Search your Gchats for “youtube.com,” sort by oldest first, and start panning for gold.
Here is an example of something you might send:
Or this:
Or this:
Please help Carmody put all the internet’s best stuff in a single place and destroy the content economy forever. Thank you.