A followup to my post last Friday. I had just heard about something happening with the blogs we hosted in 2003 and beyond at blogs.harvard.edu. I'm still not clear on what happened. I would like to know, and to see if there's anything we can do to keep the archived content available at the same address it has been at all along. #
I got a response to one of my tweets from Jonathan Zittrain, a former colleague at Berkman, who is still there. He pointed me to the FAQ they posted. Not much information there about what was about to happen, or has happened since. At the very least we should know what remains, what is gone, and what is the plan for the future. And perhaps we, outside of Harvard, can help in some way. We have some experience with these issues. #
I think a great university like Harvard that places a high value on learning, history, tradition, and played a big role in fostering the development of social media, both as the home of Mark Zuckerberg in the early Facebook days, and at the very same time to the nascent blogging and podcasting community, should take an active interest not only in preserving the record, but in helping to set standards for how the web can continue long-term, even in the age of silos and corporate ownership. We, collectively, have a responsibility imho to do this well. #
PS: Imho this is a project that should interest librarians at Harvard and elsewhere. There are a lot of great libraries there.#