Friday 18th August 2006 - San Francisco (Internet Archive)

Up this morning to head to the Internet Archive in the Presidio of San Francisco. Grabbed a quick coffee and then a cab - with a beautiful russian guy as the driver - i love the multiculturalism in this city too.

Took a cab with a young Russian guy (the driver). Between us, we navigated our way to the Presidio.

Arrived at the Internet Archive in time for their infamous Friday lunches.

After lunch a few meetings...

Met with Stuart who manages the audiovisual archives for the Internet Archive. I also met with Kristine and Gordon from the Webteam. We spoke about their audio, multimedia, software and video content. I also met with Gordon from the web archiving section of the archive. He spoke about their web crawling activities as well as their backup and storage and we discussed whether the web archiving strategy could be used as a possible model for archiving other complex resources - such as interactives.

Waited for about an hour for a cab - and after calling the company a few times, gave up.

In the end Igor gave me a lift back into the city.

It's strange being in a city where you know no-one.

Here you can walk through the streets on a Friday night along with all the other people. Went out about 9.30pm for a long walk through China Town...

...and down Columbus Avenue (the Italian part of town). Its bustling. Loads of people on the street, or having a late dinner or drink.