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July 18, 2006

the dust and bones of youth

So, for TOP SECRET reasons related to a gig I may or may not be in the running for, I'm going to be posting a ton of old articles of mine into the garchival category of the ebog blog. These are portfolio items of limited contemporary interest, so don't feel obligated to read them, although I am (for the obvious reasons) inclined to believe there may be a few items of lasting value.

That's pretty much it re: these reposts, although I do feel strangely compelled to add that the basic reason I've been forced to build this archeological exhibit is that AOL has completely ethered and disappeared the entire Africana.com archive. None of the links to original Africana.com content (as opposed to Encyclopedia Africana entries) in google or anywhere else work anymore, meaning that AOL effectively disappeared the work of literally hundreds of black writers from the Internets. (Lets not even get into the disappearing of thousands of black things those writers wrote about that were never covered anywhere else.) Sure, there is google cache and the wayback machine, which is where I am pulling a lot of this stuff from. But a "fuck you" remains a "fuck you" in my mind even when there are ways for the clever among you to get around it.

Having managed Africana.com and built AOL Black Voices, I can tell you with some authority that this is an actual fuck you. There is no compelling technological, legal or copyright reason for AOL to have evaporated the archive so completely, making the act basically one of spite, that and disregard for the community of readers and writers associated with Africana. At some point or another, someone likely told the new AOL Black Voices staff that they had to get all the articles into some masterstroke AOL content management system, and no one on the new team felt inclined to do the heavy lifting to preserve the archive. Definitely their call and I'm really not sweating it. I'm just making sure I remember who it was that did what to who.

Posted by ebogjonson in ebog housekeeping, garchival, media, memory, on July 18, 2006 3:28 PM