A vounteer based archive of everything in this world.

How about an application that keeps track of information of our entire known world at one place? Doesn’t have to be a media hosting data center.

It would have to be a volunteer based service to be functional properly.

Suppose the palladium mall near me, I know that place since I was a child. I have seen it expand, shrink. (BTW it was known as High Street Phoenix Mill back then, because it literally used to be a mill before the mall was constructed). I remember there used to be a red dragon on the big chimney near MC Donalds.

Seen new shops opening and closing, earlier there used to be a place called LandMark which hosted books, expensive toys and other stuff. I remember there were pencils that costed 99 INR and this was 2011 or 2012-ish time. There was a beyblade stadium where we once had placed and my mischievous friend stole one beyblade from there by keeping it in his pocket and revealed to us when we were out going home.

The section of Hamleys used was quite large, There was a dedicated beyblade section there.

In 2011 we took part in the summer smile contest that happened there in the main town area, We were given a card that we had to take to Cannon Galleria near Croma where we got one of our photos printed while the rest were uploaded on facebook.

(I still have card, I kept it in my wallet ever since. It’s effectively been 15 years now..!)

Soon the Landmark got closed after an year or two and never reopened.

Now fast forward this year an entire section of mall which hosted Hamleys, the pub, etc got closed (they are propably making a bigger section after destroying that one). The iconic Mc Donalds which was there since we were kids got closed this year. Had many memories there, like I remember us 12-13 years old kid going there after we got Eidi and eating the cheapest burger we could find (MC Aloo Tikki).

Anyways the point being, I know all of these because I was there and I have memories. I am sure there would be people who had much different and richer memories than me and even seen this place before us, or even before the mall was constructed.

I was thinking what if we could make a platform where the information of all the places in the world is avaialble in structured format or readable format. Think about what more memories would people have?? We already have Internet Archive to have the snapshot of internet, but what about the snapshot of our world?

It doesn’t have to store anything it could just references it from various sources online like old facebook images, videos, youtube, etc. Ofcourse eventually we have to take it out as it’s not reliable to be dependent but we could start there.

One challenge could be the verification of what’s true and what is false, but I guess now we are looking for maximum amount of information we can gather, not fact checking.