Andy Baio reacts to Upcoming.org closing down, rightfully worried that the archive will not be preserved:
“What really upsets me is that the archived events will soon be taken offline, and with no way to back it up. Ten years of history will be gone in 11 days. Good URLs never die, and I’m frustrated that every link to Upcoming will soon 404.”
These kind of archive purges, whether through negligence or purpose, seem to be coming at an increasing rate. Last year it was Digg. Now Upcoming.org. Even Formspring is shutting down and deleting all 4 billion posts. And I’m sure there were a dozen lesser-known companies in between.
Luckily there’s a new effort to download the Upcoming archive with this GitHub project. It makes it easier to spin up multiple Heroku instances to get around Yahoo’s IP address rate limiting. Andy has an update on this project and the folks behind it: Archive Team. They’re making good progress on Upcoming, as well as Posterous and Formspring.
