Saving Rev3 – Light at the End of One Tunnel (Day 25)
Well, things are going pretty smoothly now. If you look at the page, most of the content is up. That is, most of the shows that have been put in the Revision3 “archive” have been downloaded, sorted, inspected, and re-uploaded to archive.org.
It’s taken a long time.
This is day 25 of me downloading and uploading. All day. Every day.
What have I learned? Revision3 cannot take care of their content. I’ll give them a little credit. I have a list here of notes from when I started this project two years ago. It’s a short list of little issues I encountered, some of which have been fixed. This sort of surprised me. For example, there was originally a missing episode of popSiren. Missing as in not in the episode list, but it’s back now. I can’t say the same for most shows that are now in the archive. I’d say that about half the shows I’ve downloaded have one problem or another whether it be missing content, mislabeled episodes, or some other issue that you couldn’t even wrap your head around.
All the issues I stated in the last articles, they just get worse. It would be a waste of article to address them all, so if you’re really curious just click the link to the wiki page above and look through the notes section of the table. There are a few that I may have fixed and not mentioned, but most of the issues are there in readable little sentence fragments.
So where do we go from here?
I’m currently trying to scrape together the last few shows. After this, there will be a *complete* mirror of all the Revision3 archived content. I use that world complete to mean everything they offer. There are shows with holes, and I note them. I’ve also investigated some of them and found that there is true mislabeling, but some I can’t tell for sure. After I get all of this sorted through some detective work, I have to go into descriptions. This will take hours in itself (some help would be nice) so that all the content has episode descriptions. I didn’t do this initially because I wanted to make sure I had all the content. You can scrape episode descriptions from other places if things go bad, but you usually can’t find two dozen shows when they just disappear overnight.
let’s cause this descriptions bit Phase II.
Phase III will be getting other content. Yes, we got the archived shows, but Revision3 still produces content daily. This needs to be grabbed too, but questions come up. How do you archive a show that still makes video? Local copies until it dies? Upload it yearly? I’m not sure yet and am open to ideas. We must also go into Revision3 Beta, the website for which is now gone. This is where I will be focusing many of my efforts to try to snag what I can before the internet forgets it completely. Lastly, I want to expand to shows that Revision3 produced in part, but not fully. For example, I have complete runs of The Game Show and Epic Fu, both of which now appear dead. There are more shows like this, and more still going on that need to be monitored carefully. We don’t want anything disappearing into the aether.
Again, I ask for your help.
We need people. We need people for a variety of tasks large and small. What can you do to help? Download episodes. Gather descriptions. Come talk to us. Give us ideas and help us think in ways we haven’t yet. More than anything, spread the word. You might have no interest in any of this, but if you think the project holds any merit, donate a re-tweet. If you have a podcast or blog, interview me. If just one of your hundreds of internet followers is a fan, that’s one more person who might want to help be a part of this massive (and often crazy) project.
This is only the beginning. We’re going to need a bigger boat.