Future-safe archives 

The discussion about future-safing content continues.

I had lunch on Sunday with Jeff Ubois, he's been working on archiving for many years. He sent me an article by Alfred de Grazia, explaining the problem for academics. When a scholar dies, he or she leaves behind a life of work, papers, unfinished manuscripts, notebooks, pictures, recordings, and nowadays computers, disks and websites. Their family and university generally don't know what to do with them, often the problem is given to the libraries.

Our thought is to try to anticipate the problem, while the scholar is alive, and now that our work is largely electronic, to have it future-safe at all times, leave no work for the librarian, let the families and colleagues deal with the death of a relative and colleague at a personal level, and not as a professional problem.

Today's links 

Maryam and Robert announce Scoble 3.0, coming to Stanford in Sept.

Mike at TechDirt on the new RIAA-inspired royalty for webcasts. "The new rates pretty much decimate a large portion of the industry."

Washington Post: "The Patent and Trademark Office is starting a pilot project that will not only post patent applications on the Web and invite comments but also use a community rating system designed to push the most respected comments to the top of the file, for serious consideration by the agency's examiners. A first for the federal government, the system resembles the one used by Wikipedia, the popular user-created online encyclopedia."

Joost review 

Thanks to Robert Scoble for inviting me to participate in the Joost beta. I like it. The programming is very international. The user interface is radical, but appropriate. There is some Viacom content, from MTV, also from CNN and Warner Music. It's a lot like TV but on a computer. I can see installing it on Mac Mini in the den, the one that's hooked up to the 46-inch Sony HD-TV.

Sidebar: It reminds me of Jamby, a project Adam Curry was working on in 2000, except the time is right for this now, and Joost is usable. You could definitely see RSS fitting into Joost, much as they have it built into YouTube.

Oh Flickr 

On March 15, according to Flickr, you won't be able to use your "old skool" id to log on, they want you to use a Yahoo id instead. I was reminded of this because I wanted to access my Flickr account on my new laptop. I'm now going to explain the problems I had (stil have) although it makes me tired to even think about it, much less write about it.

First, here are some facts.

1. I have a Yahoo account, dwiner.

2. I have a free Flickr account, Guilty Party, associated with that account that I created by accident a few years ago. When I log on to Flickr using the dwiner name it takes me to the Guilty Party account.

3. I have a Pro account on Flickr, the one that I use regularly, Scriptingnews. It is not currently associated with a Yahoo account. I haven't got a clue how to get it associated with one. Can I have two Flickr accounts associated with one Yahoo id?

So if someone from Yahoo happens to read this, and I don't want to join your support forum, thank you (I already have enough stuff to do), please tell me what I'm supposed to do and keep it simple. I'm certainly willing to nuke the Flickr account I created by accident, it's just got some pictures of a Gephardt rally in New Hampshire from late 2003.

In the meantime, here's a screen shot of the new Joost app, on my real Flickr account.