My Favourite Website

Imagine a website that had free music, free films, free software, and free books.

I do have a fav website. I have a few. I like Arts & Letters Daily. That's cool. I like Allmusic. That's cool too. I like Space and, well, there are too many others to mention. But, there is one that is my favourite. And that site is the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive describes itself as "A digital library of internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form." What's cool is that it is free and growing daily. Imagine free access to software, including such bizarre things as Donkey Kong 64 replay, all 13 hours and 20 minutes. There's text, like the Million Book Project, Project Gutenberg, and a Children's Library of 1477 titles.

But wait, there's more. You get a moving images collection, including such titles as Reefer Madness and Sex Madness and much much more. The archive has over 2000 films from the Prelinger Archives. If you want to re-live US election madness 2004, you have your choice of 677 films. It's really amazing. It has Universal Newsreels, all 617 episodes of PBS's Computer Chronicles, Mosaic Middle East News, Independent News, etc., etc. You can stream the videos or download them.

The archive is also home of the Way Back Machine. This is where you would go to get an image of CNN's home page on any date starting in June 2000. Remember this?

The best part for me are the Audio files. There is tons of free music here, licensed under the Creative Commons. Finally, we have sanity in the copyright world. The creative commons operates a flexible copyright scheme. As a result, a whole whack of music is available, free. From Netlabels to open source recordings, and a live music archive of almost 22,000 shows. There is a huge amount of free music. I just downloaded Cisfinitum and Edwin Morris and Mogwai and Axiomatic Integration and Orphax and more.

The Internet Archives seeks to become a home "of the literary 'orphans' (works whose owners are hard to find)" in a digital age. They have filed suit to entrench this view. You can read more about that here.

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