The first publicly available Web archiving service controlled exclusively by users
http://www.hanzoweb.com PICNIC ‘06, AMSTERDAM, 29 September 2006 — A new blog archiving service is available from today from Hanzo Archives Limited, a web archiving software and services company based in England and France. Hanzoweb is the first Web archiving system designed specifically for archiving the Blogosphere using continuous incremental crawls, directed by users. Hanzoweb is free for a monthly archiving quota of 100MB. For more demanding requirements there is a choice of paid accounts, starting from €54 / year for 1GB / month.”The emergence of the participatory culture on the internet is having a huge impact on digital media. It is characterised by a levelling effect - all consumers can now be producers of content. More participation is leading the digital world into an era of increasing diversity, increasing cultural participation, instant global communications and continuous incremental change” said Mark Middleton, CEO of Hanzo Archives Limited. “The most prolific and important example of this is the Blogosphere - the collective wisdom of the internet, a human running commentary with huge participation and major influence over all things digital.”In this rapidly developing digital world, how are we to preserve the huge volume of creative cultural expression? If we don’t make efforts in this regard, what happens? The Blogosphere is fragile and ephemeral. To ensure it remains available in the long term, the Blogosphere needs to be collected and preserved - a safe haven for the collective wisdom and prolific commentary and linking it contains.” said Middleton.Hanzo provides the means by which everyone can contribute to archiving the Web in the same spirit as the content producers in building the Web. Hanzoweb enables every participant, consumer or producer, to build their own archives through Hanzo’s Web archiving platform, which enables anyone to archive the Blogs and websites that are important to them. The resulting archive will provide access to this old content forever for free to everyone.”Hanzoweb is a self-service application, the first publicly available Web archiving service that is controlled exclusively by users, designed specifically to archive the Blogosphere. Where heritage institutions such as libraries, focus on selected and event based archiving of sites of ‘importance’, Hanzoweb focuses on the ‘long tail’ - the small, eclectic, independent-minded sites, typical of the Blogosphere.” said Middleton.Users can archive pages, collections of pages, and segments of websites via two methods: a Web interface and an API.The Web user interface consists of a bookmarklet for collection, tagging and commentary of archived pages, pages for managing your archive, and pages for viewing other users’ archives. It enables users to collect individual Web pages, collections of pages and segments of websites. Its minimally intrusive interface allows users to continue reading and browsing with the collector still visible. This allows them to copy and paste into comments and tags, and other user friendly ideas.A RESTful API offers a simple means of driving your archiving needs via your blog, CMS or web service. “We have released an open source Wordpress plugin that calls the Hanzoweb API every time the user posts to the Blog. This means simply writing a blog post will result in the post being archived, along with everything it links to, and links to the archived versions inserted into the blog post.” said Mark Williamson, CTO of Hanzo Archives Limited. “Bloggers need never worry about link-rot again.”Hanzoweb uses a continuous crawler that can capture the incremental publishing typical of the Blogosphere, driven by feeds and API calls, Hanzoweb will not miss anything. Hanzoweb’s archiving system generates an authentic flat HTML archive - an exact equivalent of what the user would have experienced. This is a significant advantage for future uses of the archive.”This product represents the continuation of Hanzo’s product expansion and is a testament to the growing importance of archiving in the evolution of the Internet - in particular, the development of a collective intelligence and preservation of this extremely valuable cultural artefact.
About Hanzo Archives
Hanzo Archives Limited is a web archiving software and services company based in England and France. It was founded in 2005 by a team of software entrepreneurs and archivists from globally renowned memory institutions. We have observed important and beautiful websites emerge and disappear from the net everyday; whether by simply editing existing content, neglect, accident, censorship or oppression, this is a profound loss. We started Hanzo with the belief that archiving the content of the net is a social and cultural necessity.Furthermore, web archives, with their cumulative and stable long-lived content, are rapidly becoming the foundation to services and tools for business intelligence, commercial advantage and legal compliance. To this end we have created tools for publishers, organisations and individuals to save sites, pages and links forever.
Hanzo Enterprise
Hanzo Enterprise provides full control over the life-cycle of the total Web presence across all corporate publications, including publication, archival and deletion. Hanzo Enterprise can significantly reduce e-discovery response times by enabling direct search on the totality of your Web material, enhanced by filtering by date, keywords, metadata, publications space and so on.Hanzo Enterprise can archive every page, feed or site browsed by employees and customers. Content is archived and made available in a searchable and browsable time structured archive. Internal and external content are gathered in real time or by pre-arranged schedules and stored with metadata and tags for easy identification, organisation and retrieval. Default collection agents can be set up for key employees, who can choose to add additional agents and collections relevant to their work at any time, bringing the benefits of this knowledge to the whole corporation.
Hanzo Forge: White Label Hanzoweb
Online publishers who need the functionality of Hanzoweb but with their own branding can choose Hanzo Forge, our white label archive solution. This is a tailored version of Hanzoweb that provides publishers with a range of powerful tools to collect, organise and store their digital content and their user-generated content, and make it available to customers within the framework of their own brand.Hanzo Forge enables publishers to extend the value of their content over significant periods of time by making historical content accessible in new ways, engaging users in its preservation and enhancement. Publishers can promote their histories and values through collecting, recording, researching and making accessible material that provides an accurate and comprehensive history of their output.
Managed Archiving Services
Hanzo provides instant Web archiving capability to organisations who wish to archive content, generate indexes and aggregate data of specific interest to their business and applications. Hanzo Managed Archiving Services are available for requirements ranging from a few thousand to several millions of URLs per day.
Consulting and Development Services
To complement our products and to enable customers to integrate our products within their corporate environment, we offer consulting, development and integration services.