The Web constantly changes and evolves. That, of course, is what makes the Internet so exciting, but it also means that finding older versions of a website is hard. The current push towards the real-time web is making this problem even more apparent. Memento, a project based at Old Dominion University, wants to make it easier to access older versions of a web page without having to go to the Internet Archive. To do this, the project is using a relatively obscure feature of the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP).

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The Memento project wants to give browsers a ‘time-travel’ mode. Currently, the only way to find these pages is the Wayback Machine. According to an interview with Memento’s Herbert Van de Sompel, the mission of this project is to make it far easier for users to find older pages without having to go through the hassle of putting the right URL into the Wayback Machine’s search engine.

HTTP Content Negotiation

To do this, Van de Sompel and his colleagues are exploiting a feature in the HTTP content negotiation specs that allows them to add date-and-time negotiation to the standard negotiations that already happen whenever your browser connects to a web server. Instead of just asking for the current page, a Memento-enabled browser can also ask for an older version of that page. Some servers and content management systems already offer this feature and the Memento project has developed a demo that shows how this feature would look. According to Van de Sompel, it only takes four extra lines of codes in Apache to make this work.

While it is relatively easy for browsers to ask for an older version of a web page, content owners would have to store these older versions of their sites on their servers as well. With static sites, this is easy to do, but today’s highly dynamic web doesn’t make it easy to create an archival version of every page.

You can find more technical information about how the team envisions the future of the Memento project in this paper.

Discuss

Mm, I love the smell of data in the work day. Introduced in March 2008, YouTube Insight data and stats on video usage. In May of that year, they added demographic data. And that October, they unveiled Click-to-Buy, which used their Content ID system to find copyright-violating music and video on UGC content on the site and slap ads on it that would pay the content owners (and also worked with media companies’ videos).

I know what you’re thinking. Wait a second, Jordan—the last one doesn’t have anything to do with data.

And you’d be right. Until now. YouTube’s Content ID and Insight programs are linking up—now data owners will be able to view stats from not just the videos that they own, but also others’ videos that use their content:

Previously, when you claimed a video with Content ID, we were only able to show you basic information (like view counts and tags) associated with the video you claimed. But now, all the statistics and data we share directly with uploaders in YouTube Insight is available to Content ID partners too, making our content management tools more useful than ever — especially for partners whose claimed user videos generate lots of views for them. For example, using Insight with claimed content, Sony Music learned that the JK Wedding Entrance Dance video is currently the music label’s 8th most popular video on YouTube.

Now content owners will have access to lots more data from UGC videos that use their content:

• rankings
• demographics
• discovery sources
• “other metrics for videos that you’ve claimed”
• and compare them to their own uploads

Yes, you’ll be able to tell if those two-bit hacks are totally upstaging you with their blurry, shaky video of amateur dancing and poor sound quality.

Ouch.

While I’m all for more data, I wonder if this isn’t going to be a gateway for abuse. The Content ID system is used to identify copyright-infringing videos—but often, if the content owners can advertise on the UGC videos, the users are given tacit permission to use the content. If the content owners get jealous of these videos’ status and rankings, might they request removal because of copyright violations?

Yeah, in the end it’d probably be shooting themselves in the foot—but seriously, when do people ever have that much foresight when it comes to the Internet and business?

What do you think? Shouldn’t content owners have access to data from all videos using their content? Or is this going to open the gateway for content owners’ world YouTube domination?

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