archive.org

Archive.org is a way to look back over the web's relatively short history. Just type in a URL and you will see links to dates where an instance of a page was "archived," with starred dates indicating something changed. You can look back on the archived home pages of Yahoo and Google and see how they've evolved in terms of layout and design (notice how font sizes change from year to year in the Yahoo archives), and even subtle changes to each company's logo (was Yahoo's logo really bitmapped up until July 2002?).

Several years ago, in a distinctly different period of my life, I used to keep a personal blog, which shall remain URL-less. Though the majority of postings were fairly mundane, there was a lot of personal stuff that I would definitely NOT want, say, a potential employer, to have the ability to peruse through my prior postings. Archive.org allows you to do this by simply keying in the URL. Everything is still right there in black and red, or whatever horrid color scheme I thought was cool at the time. When I abandoned my domain name I thought that my blog would just go away. That is rarely the case: we leave a digital trail. Apparently you can prevent Archive.org from excluding your site, but who ever has the foresight to do that? Always be careful what you put in writing. It's probably out there somewhere.

Design Plagiarism

An interesting post at Design Observer got me thinking quite a bit about the idea of interaction design, graphic design (and all other aspects of HCI) and what constitutes an original idea. As fledgling interaction designers, we share ideas and use patterns and proven methodologies, and adapt existing widgets to our own purposes and liking. But where do we draw the line when we choose to "borrow" from someone else's work, especially when it is borrowed unwittingly? What about reusing code in interactive products? Copyright and intellectual property law probably have strict definitions as to what is protected, and how, but when it comes to ideas and their graphical or interactive representations, I think the lines get blurred. Can you copyright or patent a graphical layout, an interactive widget, or a page flow or process? Apparently you can: several years ago, Amazon tried (and succeeded) to patent their 1-click ordering method which raised the ire of the software community.

This makes me wonder though...how can I know if an idea I've come up with is really my own creation?