The wayback machine is a marvellous thing. It can serve a more useful purpose than letting you see the 1996 Yahoo front page. There are a lot of bloggers whose archives or old sites are gone, by design or accident. What they and their readers may not realize is that their sites are probably preserved by the Internet archive.
Matthew Yglesias has lost most of his archives.
Eric Alterman He never had any archives in the first place. (Update: all but the latest of these only gives you ‘redirect error’.)
Marshall Whitman aka the Bull Moose’s first blog
Kevin Drum’s old Calpundit site which seems to’ve gone down just this week, maybe temporarily?
They don’t just archive the front pages so in most cases you can most easily get all writings by clicking on the blogs’ monthly archives.
I was overjoyed to see that Yglesias’ stuff wasn’t lost, and if calpundit really is gone, I’ll be extremely grateful I can still read it. It seems blogs mean curiously much to me.
It seems a good deal of those endless Tac comments threads are there too.
Yep, I’ve used the wayback machine for more than a little research. Once pulled an article from Australia by someone that was being sued for things he wrote in it. Tracked down some bizarre things another public figure was trying to say he never said. A bit scary at times–I’m sure most people when they first came online didn’t really realize how. . . permanent. . . things can be.
Boy, Yglesias sure has moved from the center-right to the center-left, eh?
Only on foreign policy. But yeah, it struck me too.