I'd like to add that when I swim my body exudes good feelings from every cell. I'm a radio of good feels.#
I got an email in the middle of the night asking if I had seen an announcement from Berkman Center at Harvard that they will stop hosting blogs.harvard.edu. It's not clear what will happen to the archives. Let's have a discussion about this. That was the first academic blog hosting system anywhere. It was where we planned and reported on our Berkman Thursday meetups, and BloggerCon. It's where the first podcasts were hosted. When we tried to figure out what makes a weblog a weblog, that's where the result was posted. There's a lot of history there. I can understand turning off the creation of new posts, making the old blogs read-only, but as a university it seems to me that Harvard should have a strong interest in maintaining the archive, in case anyone in the future wants to study the role we played in starting up these (as it turns out) important human activities. #Also, thankfully it's not where the RSS 2.0 spec is stored, but it was originally posted on one of the Berkman blogs. #
In a tweet: "Throwing out this archive is like throwing out an academic journal. Why would a university do that? One of the reasons we did this work at a university was the hope/expectation it would survive over time. Only 15 years later, they want to throw it away?"#
John Palfrey, former executive director of Berkman wrote the project info page for blogs.harvard.edu in 2011. #
I just looked for some of the old 2003-2004 sites, and they're already gone. Earlier this year we lost the handle on Radio UserLand weblogs because the new owner of weblogs.com was unwilling to maintain a DNS entry pointing to them. That and Google's marking HTTP sites as not secure have been huge blows to the web as an archival medium. It's a good time to pause and reflect on the question of what was the value of all the work, and why bother continuing if the people who should care, a major university, a large research company and one of the largest tech companies, don't care about maintaining the web. What hope is there for it being maintained in the future?#
I posted a note on the Berkman-Thursday mail list which, amazingly, is still operating. Sarcastically, I don't see Yahoo saying they're getting ready to take it offline. 💥#
When I left Berkman I archived my test site from the Harvard server, and it's still here on scripting.com, and I'll do my best to keep it around. I used it to post pictures and ask stupid questions, and try out new features in the software. There are pictures of people I've known for a long time and haven't seen in ages but still love. ❤️#