Posted by
2008Central on Wednesday, July 11, 2007 6:22:49 PM
If you’re not already familiar with it, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is a great Internet resource. Every few weeks, it backs up virtually every website on the Internet and offers everyone easy and free access to its archive. In the political arena, this is especially useful for voters as it enables them to see what a candidate was saying about a particular issue a few years ago in his/her own words, on his/her website (as opposed to being filtered through news stories). However, this resource could prove to be a political liability by giving voters as well as news outlets and bloggers access to a candidate's website from a few years ago - creating yet another ghost from the past.
The good news for candidates, or anyone that doesn’t want their site archived, is that the automatic archiving of one’s website can be blocked by editing a file known as the "robots.txt" file; the bad news is that certain valuable information may never be collected if some or all utilize this feature.
Transparency in elected officials is not merely a virtue worth admiring, it's a practical necessity for the proper functioning and stability of a democracy. Accordingly, I put the current field of presidential contenders to the test by checking to see if they currently allow their campaign websites to be archived. Fortunately, I was not able to locate any current major or minor candidates that block the archiving of their campaign website, with one exception: John Edwards...
Story Continued At 2008Central.net
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