2015-02-05: What Did It Look Like?

Having often wondered why many popular videos on the web are time lapse videos (that is videos which capture the change of a subject over time), I came to the conclusion that impermanence gives value to the process of preserving ourselves or other subjects in photography. As though a means to defy the compulsory fundamental law of change. Just like our lives, one of the greatest products of human endeavor, the World Wide Web, was once small, but has continued to grow. So it is only fitting for us to capture the transitions. What Did It Look Like? is a Tumblr blog which uses the Memento framework to poll various public web archives, take the earliest archived version from each calendar year, and then create an animated image that shows the progression of the site through the years. To seed the service we randomly chose some web sites and processed them (see also the archives ). In addition, everyone is free to nominate web sites to What Did It Look Like? by tweeting :