The honor guard training focused on everything I let slip after I left Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, – how I held myself, what kind of energy I brought to work, and what my service meant to me. It was all back to blue and I wasn’t thrilled at the beginning. An inspection every morning of either our ceremonial uniform, OCP’s, or travel uniform from the flight sergeant’s keen eyes was just the beginning. Physically and mentally we were expected to absorb everything we needed in order to go out and perform the job of a ceremonial guardsman. Quickly we all learned the next 2-4 weeks were going to be much more than we bargained for. Shoulder to shoulder, unsure about what will come next. This is how the McChord Honor Guard experience begins for every new rotation of Airmen selected to be Guardsmen. I drop my stuff, run outside and fall into the eerily quiet line. Already, the new trainees are lined up outside preparing for uniform inspection. on my first day of honor guard training and I am late. Together, Techmeme’s 10 years of easy-to-visit homepages and the WayBack Machine’s half-a-trillion archived pages make for a pretty reliable vehicle to the digital past.It’s 7:30 a.m. But all those snapshots have a way of adding up. It’s also a way to safeguard against the inevitable: When some of the stories Techmeme once handpicked for its readers vanish from their original sources, all that will be left is a snapshot in time. Because Techmeme is a curation site-it features links from tech stories published all over the web-an overview of which stories it chose to highlight on any given day is the most meaningful way to experience previous iterations of its coverage. Techmeme’s approach to archives probably isn’t a way of honoring the historic value of homepages past, or even making a case for them today, but rather a matter of practicality.
There are plenty of people, me included, who have long argued that the homepage-an extension of A1 for a news site in a post-print era-is dead or dying because of social distribution. The front page of a newspaper remains a powerful place to trumpet not just the news, but news judgement. Gleaning newsiness or editorial values from story placement is, of course, a tradition rooted in print. (At a time when few sites think seriously about creating meaningful access to their archives, it’s particularly impressive that Techmeme has had this feature in place since it launched in 2005.) You get a feel for how the internet looked, and for which stories were considered important, given their prominence on the site.
They also offer a richer sense of what it was like to encounter a story on the web when that story was first being read. (For a more evocative example of the web’s transformation, I sometimes revisit CNN’s homepage as it appeared on September 11, 2001.) The larger point is that archives of old webpages-not articles but whole pages-don’t just give you a text history, like you’d get if you read a single story from some date in history. Specific stories aside, it’s neat to see how Techmeme’s look has changed-though, given the site’s text-heavy design history, its aesthetic evolution isn’t all that pronounced. On May 1, 2010, there’s a story about how Twitter was more popular with black people than white people, years ahead of most mainstream coverage of the platform’s influential role in public discourse on race. (Fast forward to today and Gawker is throwing a farewell party to its old self, as Gawker Media faces a bankruptcy auction.) On April 27, 2009, you’ll find the headline for a story about the new MySpace CEO. On January 1, 2008, the site led with a story about how Gawker’s Nick Denton would begin paying bloggers based on web traffic.
Return to the Techmeme of May 2, 2006, for example, and you’ll find a link to a story about the coming arms race between Google and Microsoft-this was three years before the launch of Bing, Microsoft’s ill-fated attempt to challenge Google search. Techmeme’s site as it appeared on June 30, 2007, the day after the iPhone was announced.Ī more haphazard approach to looking back may not be best for serious researchers focused on a single topic, but it’s certainly an entertaining exercise for tech enthusiasts.
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