Well hello, reporters! Now that we are, somewhat, moving away from the 2020 US election, let’s talk about Carbon Dating the Web.
This is a simple application that estimates when a webpage was created. You can see the TFR website, for example, dates back to 2012, but the post about MapChecking was created on June 12th, 2019.
Unfortunately, Carbon Dating won’t show when a page was updated, only created. The former is super hard to find. But think about how useful this could be for social media posts, news articles, custom websites and all sorts of stuff.
There’s also a browser extension, Finitimus, that does much the same thing, though I think Carbon Dating may be slightly more accurate.
If you do find something juicy, keep in mind that Carbon Dating is still an estimate, because it is hard. Date some pages, reporters!