One of the things I'm really concerned about personally is the archival of web comics. A number of comics that I've read over the years have already vanished from the net like Ugly Hill, Simulated Comic Product, and Minus (once linked to by XKCD! Now it's gone...).
archive.org, of course, has partial copies of some of these -- but it often seems to have trouble with comics and is usually missing years and years of content as a result.
I've actually been working on-and-off for the last year or so to make a site which makes it easier to keep up with webcomics. As a part of crawling the sites to see if there are new comics, it's pretty easy to also archive them to be able to show partial thumbnails.
Part of my motivation is similar to your worry that these things will disappear forever, despite having been a huge part of our culture. And I figure one of the best ways to get help on archiving comics is for people to complain "hey your site doesn't do comic X" and then I know that it exists and can get it into the system for crawling.
I know saying "hey I'm working on it" isn't much better than "hey I thought about that too" but if you're interested I can attempt to let you know when I get far enough to put it up on the web instead of my workstation at home.
I think rehosting is pretty bad, copyright infringement at best and not very nice to boot. That's why I decided that cropping and thumbnailing would be the way to go; enough of a picture to let someone say "yeah I saw that one already" but not so much that they don't go to the artist's site to see new comics.
Link rot really is a bastard. There's a ton of pre-2000 Internet culture and history that is, as far as I know, simply gone. Even stuff that was popular is somewhat tough to dig up in its original version rather than getting a bunch of remixed variations.
The demise of Flash killed plenty of online interactive art project, unfortunately. HTML5 didn't replace Flash as a medium for artistic experiments on the web, or it performs so bad on decent computers it's just useless.
To me the big thing is that even if it had been pulled off beautifully, the HTML5 transition doesn't say anything about the existing corpus of .SWF content. Contrary to seemingly popular belief, it wasn't all streaming video, spinning logos, and mystery meat widgets; people actually made stuff in Flash that was meant to stand on its own, not just be a component of a website. Open source .SWF players exist, but are tremendously under-resourced and have been struggling with compatibility and performance problems for years. Basically, .SWF is the .DOC of interactive animation.
I've got several Flash games I made a long time ago that I'd love to update, but it seems that HTML5 just isn't up to snuff for the art and animation heavy games I had (not to mention it would take forever to export all of that art and animation).
It sucks, because as I get older I have less time and energy and more and more competing projects that compete with that limited time.
I really don't think that's true. Flash performance was never near-native and JS is usually within 2x native once the JIT warms up. And people are still making tons of art, off the top of my head:
You linked to random stuff I have no interest in. these stuff aren't what I would call interactive experiences flash style. I'm talking about the blending of video, 3d vector graphics and motion graphics that could be run on a 2000 low end pc 16 years ago. Your js stuff don't impress me.
I'd love to find the original Napster Bad video... all I can seem to find online are the re-edit, the 2nd and 3rd ones. Not the first one. The napster bad you see online wasn't the original I remember.. I seem to remember another take of it before, that was changed and re-released.
There are many snapshots on https://web.archive.org but no actual content. Because it was only available to approved guests. Except for some enigmatic abuse, and pushing hell.com addresses. So it goes.
I can't think of another website that made quite the same impression on me as that one did. Maybe it was my young age, or the newness of the medium, but it was like a brilliant magic trick. Like the kind that actually scare you, even though you know better.
Well, it was all Javascript and Flash, so maybe really scary. And some of those web artists considered malware as an art form ;) But not the hell.com folks, I think. That was more 0100101110101101.org style.
Rhizome is an art organization, and they are approaching it in the context of art, rather than online culture. They began implementing an archiving project in the early '00s called Art Base that contains over 2000 works. These new efforts are an extension of that, bringing in current thinking on virtualization and emulation.
It is a challenging project. Many of these project have both client and server side technologies that must be recaptured, so it is more than just Flash (or Director/Shockwave). I made a project called Airworld that may be part of this Rhizome initiative [1]. It was originally commissioned by the Walker Art Center in 1999 and ultimately involved two different servers that used Perl CGI scripts, mySQL and RealServer on the back end, HTML and RealMedia plugin on the client side. The museum lacked the infrastructure and personnel to keep it alive and it slowly died over the course of 10 years.
Even though it's still in the institutions collection.
It is a big problem for 'off-line new media' too. Artist's CD-ROMs, for example. The Rose Goldsen archive of New Media Art at Cornell University Library has made a huge effort to maintain these works [2]. And physical, sculptural 'New Media' works also take massive effort to maintain. I know from experience. [3].
Museums are experts in conversation. They are beginning to think about the challenges that digital technologies bring. But there is a lot of work to do.
Wasn't Mozilla working on a browser with automated micropayments to content creators? Combined with distributed content.. something like storj.io which promises distributed (bittorrent) encrypted storage for files & cryptocurrency payments to those opening their harddrives.
On a donor-supported website I operate, people can download an e-book version of our entire catalog of writings in exchange for a modest donation. A large part of my motivation for this approach is so that these DRM-free files may serve as a distributed archive in the event that our project perishes.
The reception has been positive, I recommend the strategy to other content creators.
archive.org, of course, has partial copies of some of these -- but it often seems to have trouble with comics and is usually missing years and years of content as a result.