Saving the BBC, a bit(torrent) at a time
I love the BBC. As a concept not just as a broadcaster/concept provider. As Mitch Benn quite rightly said: "It's as british as midsummer showers and it's ours". So yeah, I kinda take attempts to shaft it by both the non-BBC (and often Murdoch-owned) media and the current government as a personal attack on an old friend.
Context aside, the BBC have been pretty much forced to take a bunch of their websites offline. Doing so won't actually save much money in the grand scheme of things, anyone who understands the web and how it works will tell you that. My suspicion is that they're being deleted for political reasons, the BBC need to be seen to be doing something to cut costs in order to appease its critics.
But once again, community spirit may save the day. You may remember that back in the 1970s the BBC deleted its back catalogue, including its master copies of lots of pre-1970 TV shows. Many shows were lost, but the most famous example is Doctor Who - the original tapes of the Hartnell and Troughton eras (as well as some of the early Pertwee episodes) have all been lost. Thankfully, for Doctor Who fans anyway, most of these episodes still exist and many have since been cleaned up and released on video or DVD thanks to the fact that people of the day recorded them for personal use and have since made them available to the masses.
Now we have the chance to save history again. We can save these websites. Ben Goldacre's blog recently brought to my attention a fellow geek who had basically spidered all of the websites the BBC plan to remove, and combined them together into a torrent. The torrent is available in several places, and I've mirrored it here as well. So here is my plea:
- If you are a BitTorrent user, and you have a bit of hard disk space to spare, please start this torrent and seed it for as long as you possibly can. I myself am doing so as I write, and I have a 24/7 server. The more copies of this stuff that's out there, the better. Even if you don't ever plan to use any of the data contained within, this is stuff that needs to be saved, so please seed it.
- If you have a website or hosting space of your own, please download the .torrent file and mirror it somewhere, making sure you publicise the link in a blog entry like this one, or a comment on a blog entry on this subject. It's a really really small file and will use virtually no bandwidth or disk space, but allows people to download all these websites.
Hopefully in years to come this will all be worth something, and we will all have something to tell our grandkids about : )