I now own a vibrant community website, started in 2000, that was compromised & erased in 2003. The previous owner had no backups. Hundreds of articles, tens of thousands of forum discussions, and hundreds of thousands comments were lost. We regrouped, and rebuilt the community. Archive.org was the only record left of any of the content, and we grabbed & distributed lost member avatars to quickly make the new site feel like home. I still reference it from time to time to piece together gaps in our history.

If the Internet has any institutions at all, Archive.org is first among them. Donation sent.

Also see the famous case of Jeff Atwood losing and recovering the articles from codinghorror.com and blog.stackoverflow.com ...

[1] http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/12065/recovering-...

[2] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/12/international-backu...

I had to dig through their site to find this, as it wasn't immediately noted on their donation page, but they are a 501(c)(3) non-profit and donations should be tax-deductible for US taxpayers.

http://www.archive.org/about/about.php

FYI: it's on the front page, on the top-right container, labeled "Welcome to the Archive". But the site isn't the best layout on the internet, it's pretty easy to miss.

Wow. Haven't felt so blind in a while! Good catch.

I doubt you're alone in that :) And it's quite possible your comment here will be seen by more people, so it serves its purpose :D

And some employers will match charity donations, so you may be able to double your contribution!

The internet archive does a really good job. Why isn't it possible to establish a payment for good work in the internet? The fact that everything has to be free lead us to the really evil use/abuse of private data by the likes of Google, Facebook etc.

I think we need a good idea to assure payment also for internet services. Lets face it: nothing is free in this world. It sometimes just looks as if.

Donation send for this time. But if someone has a good idea how to finance good services, please speak. (I think, Mozilla might listen too).

I'm not sure I fully understood your comment but flattr is an interesting platform for paying small sums to pages you enjoy. You may enjoy it if it is new to you. http://www.flattr.com

There are ways to collect money. But clients seem to be hesitating. They expect "free" services.

Bitcoin seems like a perfect solution for solving this problem.

Going to http://archive.org the only notification for "donate" is a text link in "announcements". It seems like they could make the link a bit less subtle, but still be tasteful.

I specifically went to the page looking for how to donate (rather than going through the linked to blog post.

Absolutely. It's the only way to find a huge chunk of the internet, and it's been endlessly useful to me. Second only to Wikipedia, I'd say, though it's a lot less well-known.

I was walking home yesterday and saw a small sign denoting the Internet Archive building on Clement and Funston St. in Inner Richmond, SF. A bit surreal seeing the Archive of the Internet(!!) housed in white pillared building. And today, here it is on the fp of hn.

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=internet+archive&hl=en&...

It's a former Christian Science temple.

If there ever was a perfect example of "don't be a free user", this would be it.

It would have been nice if they did not have the "minimum $10" clause. I am sure there should be a lot of students and third world people willing to help within their means.

There are probably processing fees and whatnot that make anything less than $10 useless or even cost them money.

If you can't afford $10 then you hold probably just keep the money, you need it more than they do.

Do you realize $10 has a higher value in developing countries? If not, I am surprised you are on HN!

I had the pleasure of meeting brewster through a free event I was putting on some time ago. He is a remarkably generous man, in all senses of the word. Donation sent.

They have twenty donations waiting for them on Flattr: https://flattr.com/thing/425480

Fell out of the funnel when they asked me to create an account on JustGive. I don't use PayPal.

Give me a form I can type my payment details in, and I'm game.

Same here; I've asked them if they have any other options, and failing that, I'll just use the check-by-mail feature of my bank.

Sites that do this universally bounce me. If somebody wants to give you money, the worst thing you can do is get in their way.

I went through JustGive and go to the point where I had to set up an account to donate. I'm at work, I have about 2 minutes to slip a donation through. I quit, I may donate again at home tonight if I remember.

when I read the headline, I thought they meant content, not money. I was ready to mail them a few harddrives with worthy "stuff"...

you should contact Jason Scott, if thats the case. HE acepts all comers - https://twitter.com/textfiles

160 employees? that seems like a lot to me. So no, sorry, I'm not going to donate. I'd rather donate to charities that really need money.

You would be surprised that most charities spend excessive amounts of their donations to raise more money. An online charity that is using its money to employ people is a better charity than one that publishes glossy brochures or takes out advertisements.

Do you have any figures to back that up? Most charities here in the UK publish their expense ratios (i.e. how much is spent on admin, fundraising, on the actual good cause etc.) and they tend to be fairly efficient.

There's a pie chart titled 'Where Your Money Goes' displayed on the donation page (http://www.archive.org/donate/index.php).

Expense ratios for Internet Archive:

    Programs: 88%
    Administration: 10%
    Fundraising: 2%

A lot of big charities in the UK employee "clipboard-nazis" near busy shopping areas to get people to sign up and make you feel guilty if you don't. These people normally earn 25 GBP per sign-up (which takes on average 10 months to recover iirc). Other charities spam you with mailings.

Now clearly this works: they are raising more money this way, but the side effect is that people like me refuse to give to a charity that hassles me every time I go to the supermarket, and spams me every time I give them money.

These days, that is generally done through an intermediary firm. I don't think many charities hire their own clipboard-wielding youths, so they wouldn't be counted as employees.

By the way, I had some trouble figuring out the right term to put into a search engine. Turns out the industry term for this is "face-to-face street fundraising". And in the UK it's sometimes called "charity mugging" or even "chugging", which you have to admit is more amusing than going straight to Godwin...

Some charities do employ their own staff, because they want greater control over the process and staff who know about the charity, rather than agency staff who might be 'selling' a different charity each week.

Even if they're an agency, the ones I know of are paid hourly, not per sign-up.

It's probably hard to successfully argue against vagueness like 'most' and 'excessive', but Charity Navigator pulls together lots of information:

http://www.charitynavigator.org

My takeaway is that there are plenty of large charities that spend more than 90% of their revenues on their mission and plenty that don't. For me, the big ones that do 90% makes it hard to feel great about a smaller charity that only hits 70% (but then I am a crank that dislikes solicitation).

There's an interesting article on lesswrong about efficient charity. It's not really about the expense ratios but the impact of the donation. http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gj/efficient_charity_do_unto_others...

The collections team groups "items" into "collections", an item being a book, movie, song, etc. Has nothing to do with collecting cash.

That's 'collections' like a library or museum has collections. The Archive has a 'Web Collection', a 'Books Collection', an 'Audio Collection', etc.

FYI, I'm a former full-time and current part-time employee of the Internet Archive.

Thanks for clarifying... my bad.

Still, it's not really a cause I value.

It is preserving the sum of knowledge being generated on the internet, which is orders of magnitude faster than any other information and data generation system ever in history. It is extremely important to keep records of everything we do online. Saving a life now is great and all, but documenting history like the archive does is essential for history to be preserved.

Also, to generate revenue they would have to privatize some of their data or start selling ads, which for the same reasons wikipedia is funded by donations, doesn't work with public services.

Same with wikipedia. It's ironic that the current "Please donate to wikipedia" banners actually annoy me FAR more than little relevant adverts would.

Maybe scanning books in or archiving live concerts or saving some geocities pages is something you're interested in, but I'm skeptical it's really preserving history for the good of mankind.

I'd also like to know why they have 160 employees. That's more people than any company I've ever worked for. What do all of these people do? I'm genuinely curious.

The Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive) says: "It has a staff of 200, most of whom are book scanners in its book scanning centers. Its main office in San Francisco houses about 30 employees." The site has a list of employees with descriptions: http://www.archive.org/about/bios.php

A blog post about its scanning centers: https://ianews.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/3-million-texts-for-... "More than 100 people digitize books in Internet Archive scanning centers in 27 libraries in 6 countries. At 10 cents a page, we are bringing over 1,000 new books online every day."

Ah! I didn't know they were involved in book scanning as well. That makes sense. Thank you.