Think of the Web as an enormous, slow hard disk. Shared by the entire world, this disk holds a record of radical media experimentation, the history of a form that sprang up less than a decade ago to infect popular consciousness and transform the way we use information. Yet despite a few archival projects, no one is backing up our collective disk.

That's not what you'd conclude from a casual glance at leading Web sites. Almost every major Web magazine has an "archive" which holds old content. These are not real archives, however, any more than home pages are real homes, or real pages. They do not preserve early versions of the site-they only keep the most popular old content online and accessible, for the sake of additional banner-ad revenue. The archive of HotWired is typical in leaving out some early content: A serialized novel and an advice column, early Web-based experiments in these forms, are omitted. The old content that remains online is seldom in its original format, even though form is of clear importance to the Web's development.