
The nytimes they are a-changin' - sahillavingia
http://okayfail.com/2011/nytimes-timelapse.html
======
petercooper
This did well on HN a week ago too:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2778219>

Seeing so many signs in the last year that HN is formed of different
overlapping audiences that visit at different times of the day. Tons of dupes
lately.

~~~
martey
While I have also noticed many duplicate articles, one way the community could
try to avoid them would be by making sure that they are posting original
sources (as suggested in the official guidelines), and not random blog posts
(like the post a week ago).

edit: I have just noticed <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2777508> ,
which AFAIK links to the same URL as this.

~~~
petercooper
Yeah, although sometimes it's not particularly obvious. I've noticed a lot of
links to a site called <http://ontwik.com/> being posted in the last few
months (a Google search for ontwik on news.ycombinator.com shows over 100
results). It's a site that seems to take embeddable videos from YouTube, Vimeo
and the like and turn them into pages like
[http://ontwik.com/html5-2/html5-games-with-rob-hawkes-of-
moz...](http://ontwik.com/html5-2/html5-games-with-rob-hawkes-of-mozilla/) ..
I can see why people are linking these things up, even though it should be the
original YouTube video getting the link.

------
jbrkr
This is based on an incorrect assumption: _... no one is storing their
frontpage layout data._

The Newseum has this _covered_ for over 800 newspapers. A recent front page of
the New York Times, for example:

[http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/hr.asp?fpVname=NY_NY...](http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/hr.asp?fpVname=NY_NYT)

~~~
donohoe
The NYT also stores their data... see my reply further up:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2801652>

------
spudlyo
Wow, I had no idea the ads were so huge and invasive. It made me wonder how
much Ralph Lauren spent to have their ads take what seemed to be over 50% of
the on-screen real estate.

~~~
ojbyrne
Just to be fair, many of the most intrusive ads I saw there were interstitials
- they show for a few seconds then disappear.

------
citricsquid
It's interesting to see the typo fixes and how long different stories last. At
2:11 a story relevant to us all. I wonder (with regards to his point about
things disappearing forever) if a distributed effort among "tech people" to
catalog a lot of websites would work, different people run nodes that are
given tasks. Would be neat to keep a track of the top 1,000 article driven
sites for a year (not just news, reddit, hn etc.)

> Due to an errant cron task that ran twice an hour

This has happened to me a few times. Recently I had _accidentally_ collected
over 100,000 copies of a website over a 3 month period after forgetting the
thing was running.

------
rmccue
Somewhat off-topic: watching the Chilean miners story in the video was
heartwarming as the number rescued increased.

------
jeremymims
Perpetually.com solves this problem. In fact, they're already working with
newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and for every major federally elected
political candidate. More than just random screen captures, every article,
every change, every link and state are preserved. It's like Apple Time Machine
for the Internet.

<http://www.perpetually.com/>

Full Disclosure: I advise this company.

------
molbioguy
Reminds me of Spock's Tricorder in the Star Trek episode 'The City on the Edge
of Forever'. Playing back history at high speed. Very cool.

------
jwomers
Wow, completely agree about how the layout, and emphasis on different
headlines, topics, categories, advertising etc.. are all huge indicators of
society's interests and conceptions of the world. That said, I would be
surprised to learn that the nyt doesn't store their front page every day into
some archive? If they don't, then someone must!

~~~
donohoe
They do.

The CMS has all the rankings. Rank meta data is stored with articles,
including (if published in print) where it was in the physical paper and what
editions(s).

On the web site front, there are internal process capturing the Homepage HTML
and that goes back maybe 10 years at this point.

On a more public level you can still find the Homepage from a given date here:

<http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2008/02/06/>

you can extrapolate the rest:

<http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2008/02/06/business/>

Those would represent the last view of the day before the date rolled over in
the CMS.

------
ck2
If they collected the html and not just screencaps, it would be interesting to
see a word-cloud evolve and change over time too.

Too bad there isn't an annual follow up for every major story.

------
adamfeldman
The pace of news is the pulse of the day

~~~
mnemonicsloth
Counterpoint: "news" is the lie that something important happens every day.

~~~
sliverstorm
Depends on what you define as "important", but with 6.5 billion people on the
world, there are certain to be remarkable or notable events with great
regularity and frequency.

~~~
granite_scones
Important to whom? What people find remarkable and notable varies wildly. What
may be notable to one group (say the residents of X-town may find the mayoral
election notable) might not be to another (Y-town doesn't care).

Something remarkable or notable may happen every day, but it's not necessarily
the case that something remarkable or notable to a specific person happens
every day.

