TechByte: The Internet has an Infinite Memory

The internet has an infinite memory. On this week’s TechByte I’m going to show you how to use that memory for your advantage.

Tell me if this sounds familiar: You’re browsing an article online, and you think it’s pretty interesting. A few days later, you decide to share that article with a friend, and… it’s gone. Pretty frustrating, right?
Well, there are plenty of legitimate reasons that a journalist or publisher might take down an article. Maybe updated information made it inaccurate, maybe the writer got a stern talking to by his editor. In any case, sometimes you want to pull up that archived article.

That’s where two services come in. One we’ve talked about before, and one new one.

Archive DOT today offers webpage captures of news articles that can’t be altered by the original website owner. So if there’s, say, a controversial topic you want to capture, all you need to do is copy the link to the article and paste it into the text bar on archive DOT today.

You can also search for articles on archive dot today. It’s entirely community driven.

I also want to talk about the wayback machine again real quick. It’s useful for just having fun and looking at old website, but it’s also extremely useful for checking on previous versions of articles and websites to see if there’s been any funny business.
It’s good for all kinds of websites, not just news articles. This will let you look at websites for places that are out of business, or services that are no longer available. This is great for fact checking… and just making sure you aren’t crazy and really do remember that website.

These are just a few of the tools that can be extremely useful for fact checking and reliably sharing links to articles that never expire.