Manton Reece on permanence
By
Dave Winer on Saturday, July 21, 2012 at 2:24 PM.
 Manton makes a point that everyone with a website should be thinking about.  "Nothing lasts on the internet. I could write on my weblog for years and the next day get hit by a bus. The domain expires, the posts are lost, and it doesn't matter if I had 10 readers or 10,000; it's as if it never happened."
Everything on the Internet is like that. We should fix that bug.
We should make it so there is part of the Internet that does not expire. A place where you can put stuff, write them a check, and be reasonably confident that it will stay there as long as there is human civilization on this planet.
 Librarians, this is the conclusion of what I've been writing about re Twitter and the Library of Congress. It's a small piece of a much longer thread on future-safing our Internet-based creations. A great example. In the early part of the 2000's, my company hosted a lot of blogs at a site called radio.weblogs.com. The company shut down, and the question came up of what to do with the archive? I asked Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, if he could take care of it. He agreed to. So they are acting as custodian for these sites. But this was too ad hoc, and there are still many other UserLand resources that are not safe, that should be part of a permanent record. What do we do with them? For now Jake Savin, a former employee of the company, is keeping them safe, as a labor of love. This is even more ad hoc.
We could probably pull together enough money to archive this stuff permanently, now while most of the people who had sites there are alive. But over time, that will become more difficult. And this is just one blogging community.
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