www.archive.org

Having previous versions of websites available to the world is an interesting idea, and one that I didn't know existed until now. I played with the “wayback” utility a little bit and found it to be quite interesting. The ability to go and see past content of websites strikes me as being very cool, and at the same time a little disconcerting.

The greatest use of this tool I see is by lawyers litigating copyright infringements or other web content change type problems. Since most professional web engineers make sure the look and feel of their web content is ready before publishing, I don’t think there is an issue of embarrassment related to previous versions of their sites. But for websites that have hosted “online music sharing” or other such file swapping that was common in the past and “found” later to be not acceptable by our cherished legal profession in their relentless search for ways to litigate for cash (otherwise known as legalized extortion), past websites can come back to haunt content owners (even if corrected) when the new rules were passed.