Dave Winer on “Preserving Ideas“:
No one really likes to think about dying, but it comes for everyone, eventually, and if you’re living a creative life, as so many of us are these days, maybe you’d like your creations to live at least a little bit longer than you do? Look at it another way, suppose there’s a James Thurber, Mark Twain or Truman Capote or George Harrison among us, wouldn’t that person likely be creating on the web, and shouldn’t their work last longer than their own lives?
It’s something I’ve thought about, too. I spent several years going through boxes and boxes of old photos, letters and memorabilia after the grandparents passed away, scanning most of it to preserve it for future generations, the whole time patting myself on the back for being smart enough to store my own work digitally for the future.
Yet as Dave points out, everything (especially digital work) is transient and fragile:
Now my work is probably a bit more fragile than most people’s, you may store your blog at Blogger or LiveJournal, where other people are doing the maintenence, but if you read the user agreement covering your site, what responsibility do they have to keep your site running? You might lose everything, even while you’re alive, and have no legal recourse. I store movies at blip.tv and pictures at Flickr. They sure are convenient, but how do I know they’ll exist in two years or ten? It seems a long shot that they’ll be there in 50 or 100 years.
Have you thought about how to preserve your work? Dave promises that he will be giving some of his considerable brain power to this problem in the future. I will be following that closely. If you have ideas, you should post them here or over on his WordPress blog.
At breakfast this morning, Jeff Ubois, who has made this area his life’s work, noted that it seems a lot of people are thinking about this now. Indeed, they are. There are some huge ideas here. Why now? Well, after almost ten years of blogging, there might be something worth preserving. Being 51, and having survived a life-threatening illness at 47 makes me aware that there’s no time like now. I’m already caring for the archive of my uncle who passed in 2003. What will become of his blog when I pass? To have it disappear then is simply not acceptable.
Food for thought.
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