My experience with archives tell me that the things the future considers important are rarely the things we consider important today. If we can save data about the use of the web today in a reasonably compact and persistent format, the future historian may be able to draw conclusions from it that will seem as far-fetched to us as, say, deducing the 17th century European hyperinflation initiated by the influx of gold from America by chartering the changing prices of Swedish iron ingots at the export harbours from the export tax records. The users of the web characterisations of the future will belong to one of three different groups, as we have outlined in the briefing package for the web characterisation activity. In this document, I will discuss the motivations for site and log file owners to join the web characterisation activity. This is based on personal experience as webmaster and Intranet administrator, as well as informal discussions with managers of web sites in the past.
Performance is easier to measure.
However, the performance of a web site has several components to it, some of which may not be under control of the site maintainer. Another specific problem is that we cannot predict what will be requested in the future. Short of packet traces, there is no way of capturing everything that passes over the network. Storing packet traces for everything that passes through a network will require enormous amounts of space, even for a small network. That said, it is not impossible to expect that packet traces will be stored as samples of traffic in some instances, and if these can be related to the log files, the conclusions that can be drawn from this information would propably be very valuable.