25th commemoration of Black July across the web

Sites that over the week put up content to commemorate the anti-Tamil riots of 1983 in Sri Lanka were many and ranged from a plethora of wire services to an equally diverse range of blogs, each with their own take on the events a quarter century ago in real time, yet just yesterday for some of the victims. 

I started to plan for the content on both Groundviews and Vikalpa from early June. Both sites now feature a tremendous wealth of perspectives on Black July, which I’ve written about earlier. I was particularly touched by one contributor who sent an article in spite of medical orders to rest after eye surgery, noting in the email to me that an invite to contribute to the site was not one that could be refused. Others have told me in person and on email that the collection of articles / videos on the site as the best selection on any one website they have seen commemorating ‘83.

There were many others in the Sri Lankan blogosphere who wrote about the events. Four posts in particular I enjoyed reading were:

• 24 July 1983 on PACT: A very good starting point for research on Black July. Peace and Conflict Timeline (PACT) itself is a great initiative that I have reviewed in detail. 
• Black July at 25 on Sepia Mutiny: A great post and great discussion, a rare and happy coincidence.
• Six days in July on Pass the Roti: A great list of links to other (web) sites with commentary and information on Black July and an interesting post to boot.
• Weird nostalgia: A bit naive and simplistic but redeemed at the end by the reference to Funny Boy which I think is Shyam’s best work to date. 

Any others that you came across worth reading?

How much of information is too much information?

When it comes to Google, the size of the web and the size of their index are apparently very different.

What’s interesting to recognise here is that Google cannot afford to index ALL of the web. Coupled with the fact that we are losing, irrevocably, information that defines us a larger humanity or as identity groups and individuals, it just begs the question as to whether all this information has contributed to an equal growth in knowledge. 

I think not.

I’ve raised a number of questions that trouble me very deeply as someone deeply interested in saving the knowledge generated, used, abused and ignored in a peace process. Terabytes of information hugely pertinent to researchers, historians and scholars of a process as multi-faceted and complex as peacebuilding are often to be found in disparate proprietary systems with limited access, proprietary formats with encryption keys residing with those at risk themselves of being killed, badly managed archives, perishable media and aren’t backed up – to name just a few of the problems. 

I was caught by the fact that what people consider the web is actually what Google defines as the web:

But it’s also very expensive to index sites. And the fact that Google indexes many news sites, blogs and other rapidly changing web sites every 15 minutes makes all that indexing even more expensive. So they make value judgment on what to actually index and what not to. And most of the web is left out.

Emphasis mine. 

I find that last bit positively frightening.