Wanted to let everyone here know about this new site. Myself and some others have started a yoyo history site called 'The YoYo Archive". www.yoyoarchive.org, you can also find us on Instagram.
A few of us were talking about how the community in general hasn’t been great at saving our history. You look at most hobbies and you can find a lot of information on the history of that hobby. But with yoyo you have to really search it out. Our goal is to make sure yo-yo’s history isn’t forgotten.
One thing we are doing is archiving photos of yoyo series and brands. We have a photo archive of the Duncan Freehand 1, Freehand Zero. We have an archive for Anti-Yo, BuzzOn, Spencer Berry and Matt Schmidt’s yoyos, and we’ve already begun several other brands and have been suggested several others. We would like to catalog every yoyo that is released in a series. We are hoping to eventually have every FH1, FHZ, every BuzzOn, and probably our largest endeavor that we are working on is our YoYoJam archive.
We really want this to be a community supported site. If you have suggestions, please DM us on Instagram, email us (theyoyoarchive@gmail.com), DM me here. If you have photos of yoyo’s we don’t have please send them to us.
Some great people in the community have offered to help out and we’ve got a lot planned for the future of the site.
What we are working on right now:
A Newspaper article series. Later this week the first volume will be posted, it will cover articles from 1888-1939.
Several more brands are being researched.
Catalog, Newsletter and Magazine archives
A couple YouTube series are being discussed as well.
If you have suggestions or would like to help out, please let me know. Hope you enjoy the site!
I love this idea! Will you build on the this work? Looks like 2014 was some of the last content added. YOYOEXPERT in fact announced sponsorship in 2014. I wonder what happed.
We wanted to combine the ideas of the YoYoMuseum and the YoYoWiki, but not repeat them, there is a lot of great info on both of those sites. We just wanted something more. We wanted a spot you could view all yoyos of either a brand or a certain model, like our Freehand pages. We wanted to see if we could find photos of every model released and build a gallery.
But we’re also going beyond what those sites are doing by archiving newsletters, catalogs (we have Duncan catalogs back to 1983), newspaper articles. We’ve set up a YouTube channel and are talking about 2-3 series for that. We’re also talking about doing interviews with people that are in the community or were in the past.
We’ve got a lot of ideas and plans but the basic idea is to gather as much history from the community as we possibly can before it disappears.
This is a really cool thing you guys are doing. Super excited to follow the project and hopefully contribute to it in some way in the near future. Thanks for the hard work you’re putting in.
I love this! So much modern yoyo history has been lost on forums that have came and went. We should do everything we can to preserve what we can, and this is an awesome way to help contribute to that. (Somewhat related side note: I also appreciate @DocPop’s videos on yoyo history related subjects, I think those are incredibly important as well and anyone reading this should check them out if you’re interested in the history and modern development of our hobby)
@p44company’s comment got me thinking that someone should probably download all the Sector Y videos just in case those disappear one day too. Lots of early trick development captured on video there. Maybe a section on the site where those are all uploaded and downloadable just in case? Better to have them in multiple places than not at all.
Also I feel like this is a good time to bring up that we should once again make an effort to get the YYN forums back online as an archive (I think @Isaac made a topic awhile back about this? Any updates?). There is an absurdly enormous amount of history on there that is now just gone. Hopefully the 1) data is still there somewhere and 2) someone can reach out to JD to get that up again? Once it is, a downloadable copy of the entire forum made available on that site would be god-tier preservation.
When YYN went live again a few years ago I went in and saved a number of topics. Unfortunately, the way forums were setup back then, all the photos were stored by the members. Almost all the photos on the site were gone YYN had the most epic Freehand thread ever. Hosting/Storing an archive of an entire forum is beyond my knowledge. I’d need some assistance from some others to do something like that. Last I heard it was going to take quite a bit of work, and money, to get the YYN files back to where they needed to be to make them live again. But maybe @Isaac has some more, up-to-date, info on that?
We’re discussing a couple different video series right now all about yoyo videos. Hopefully more info on that real soon.
YYN had the most epic Freehand thread ever. Hosting/Storing an archive of an entire forum is beyond my knowledge. I’d need some assistance from some others to do something like that. Last I heard it was going to take quite a bit of work, and money, to get the YYN files back to where they needed to be to make them live again. But maybe