Bayosphere.com Website Review

eJournal blog at the San Jose Mercury News. We reminisced about those days of experimentation, and looked ahead at some big issues. One of the latter is preservation. How can we save what we’re creating online? It’s a nontrivial question. Ten years ago today, I started a blog. It was later removed from the Web by the company that employed me to write it,  and until today only existed inside an archive that can itself be a bit ephemeral. restored post on this site). It described the new site, called EJournal, which was located at SiliconValley.com described the purpose of the exercise. As I wrote that day: > compressed the lives of all kinds of people in all kinds of > businesses, and journalism is no exception. In fact, it may be one On two occasions during the five-plus years I wrote the blog for Knight Ridder, which owned the newspaper and the website, the company removed it from the Web. The first time was because of a platform change combined with the company’s misguided understanding of what the Web was about; removing history struck me as perverse and still does. The second time was after I left Knight Ridder; the reason given was that it would be too costly to keep running the server — something that again struck me as bizarre. But they had the right to delete it, even if I though they were doing a dramatically wrong thing. What prompted this project was the remarkable Web-sleuthing of Rudolf Ammann many of the earliest posts. This made me wonder if it might be possible to resurrect a lot more or even most of what had gone scraping, parsing and otherwise pulling out of the Archive as much as possible. We’re not nearly done. We’re looking for more of the EJournal, of course — dozens or perhaps hundreds of posts are still missing, and We’re also planning to add as much as we can find of the Bayosphere project, another site that has gone off the air. Bayosphere, some of you may recall, was an abortive Bay Area blog that was sold to Backfence, a hyperlocal media site that failed. The Backfence folks