I personally feel that we always think of “The Internet” as this large, monolithic entity that can’t be recorded or archived in any way, and yet, we always say that once something is on the internet, it can’t be deleted. Of course, those two beliefs clearly contradict one another. The essay’s recurring example of the blog post abou the downing of the airplane is a good example of why we need the archiving capabilites and how they can come in handy. But what if nobody had pressed the “archive button” in time? The blog post would have been lost forever, and so there are clearly large differences between publishing on the web and publishing in print. This essay does a good job of pointing out that the internet can in fact be archived, but never immediately and not all at once, so there are limitations.

I never knew that there was an Internet Archive recording almost everything on the public web, and the idea of doing so seems daunting, especially since there just so much information out there. I was fascinated by Kahle’s claim that the internet would weight 26,000 pounds, as that is a much more reasonable to think about than just the abstract idea of “the internet” or “the cloud.”