The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

Have you ever thought you lost something and then discovered it wasn’t lost after all?

That’s how I felt Wednesday night winding down for sleep after watching a show on Netflix. Checking the calendar on the iPhone, it occurred to me it’s coming up on 10 years since I made that first trip to D.C. in the Roadtrek to be in town for the official opening of the “Nation to Nation” treaty exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

The museum staff had contacted me about licensing a photograph we published of the Chinnabee Falls in the Talladega National Forest for the exhibit, so I wanted to be there for the opening. The timing worked out great, and we got the best story in the country on the show, which just so happens is still the centerpiece exhibit in the museum.

And because of this cool thing called a web archive accessible over the internet, you can still see the story without leaving home and having to scroll through microfilm at a library.

Smithsonian Opens ‘Nation to Nation’ Treaty Exhibit in National Museum of the American Indian

Chinnabee Silent Trail Falls near the Lake Chinabee and Cheaha State Park in the Talladega National Forest, Alabama: Kenny Walters

Another cool thing about a web archive, as opposed to the stupid organizational weakness of a social media platform like Facebook, you can not only find things using a website search engine. If you scroll down to the bottom of the New American Journal website, you will see a monthly archive as well. So I wanted to take a closer look at what we published in the month of September, 2014, ten years ago.

This is what came up.

Monthly Archives: September 2014

As I was scrolling down through that month, there was a surprise I did not expect to find. You may have seen me refer at times to a speech I delivered at the Birmingham Southern “Writing Today” Conference in the Spring of the year 2000, when I was invited to talk about the future of web publishing by a writer named Fred Bonnie. I knew Bonnie from Birmingham, but he had become aware of a new online magazine we published out of Knoxville, Tennessee, called The Southerner.

We published a couple of Bonnie’s short stories in the Summer 2000 issue. Another cool thing about the web. You can still read them for free here with no paywall and no popup ads.

Gone With Wind

All You Can Eat Night

Unfortunately, Bonnie died in a car wreck not long after that.

In Passing: Fred Bonnie

I had long thought that the web page I created for that speech had been lost forever, since it was published on the Birmingham Southern website. Of course Birmingham Southern is now out of business, unfortunately.

In the early days of the internet, before people finally figured out that the web was going to be the library of the future, some web pages were allowed to disappear. I was an early advocate for preserving these early websites, many of which are now housed in the internet archives Way Back Machine, including The Southerner.

In those days, if I thought something might get lost to history, I would save it on my computer desktop as a web archive page or PDF file.

So when I was looking back at the New American Journal archives for September, 2014, I noticed that I had not only saved a PDF copy of the web page for that talk. I also uploaded it to the New American Journal.

When I first set up the NewAmerianJournal.Net website back then, I had to “populate” the site with some content before we started publishing new stuff to complete the new design.

Over the past decade I forgot this and thought the actual speech was lost. But while laying in bed there perusing my own archives from 10 years ago, there it was, preserved for posterity – at least until the bots take over and delete everything they’ve stolen from us to learn how to communicate.

You may notice my prediction on the timing of the death of print newspapers. There may still be a few around, but most are long gone.

A Web Published Talk on Electronic Publishing in 2000

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