Ahead of the web archiving conference at the National Library in Jerusalem next week, I curated with my Omilab team a 'virtual exhibition' celebrating 20 years of the Israeli websites with data from the Wayback Machine. The exhibition, produced by the talented digital department of the national library, aims to raise awareness to the importance of Web Archiving in Israel. It serves as an appetizer, showing some of the beloved websites in Israel in the past 20 years (some of them extinct by now). Rather than portraying a full/analytical view/narrative of the Israeli web, the exhibition invites its visitors to create their own web histories and explore more on the Wayback Machine. Although the exhibition's interface is in Hebrew, non-native speakers can still enjoy the time-travel, simply by clicking one of the buttons at the entry page. BTW, the buttons are "Take my back" and "I'm feeling lucky" :-)
Looking back at websites from the the end of the nineties, I am always struck by how colorful-yet-messy the Web used to be. I liked it much better when it was more creative, interesting, diverse, funky (and perhaps also ugly, as some would say) than it is today, thanks to platforms, unified forms and structured data.
So much for Web nostalgia.
Looking forward to the conference.