Webrecoder.io Shares “Self-Hosted Archival Embeds” Proof of Concept

Ed. Note: If you’ve never taken a look at the important work that Webrecorder.io is doing and used the service itself (free), we highly recommend stopping by. 

From the Webrecorder.io Blog:

The embedded web page is everywhere: Many web sites, social media in particular, allow users to embed content—text posts, videos, map widgets, or full social media timelines—into other pages located outside of their respective originating services. This practice has become a cornerstone of online discussion culture and criticism, political journalism, brand-building, and helps providing services to visitors of a page.

Ever since political discourse has largely moved to social media, news sites have embedded tweets, facebook posts, or other social media items directly into their articles.

But what if the embedded content changes after the fact? Depending on the social media platform, text posts might be edited, comments be added or deleted, the whole account might change ownership resulting in modified user names or profile images, or the content might be removed altogether, because of changed platform policies or by choice of the creator. In many cases, this will cause confusion on why the item was embedded in the first place, as the embedding page, for instance a piece of political journalism, will provide context that doesn’t apply anymore to the item discussed. A common workaround to that problem have been foregoing embeds in favor of screenshots. However, screenshots lack the interactive depth and fidelity that a full embed provides.

Read the Complete Blog Post (approx. 1300 words)

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