The issue of sources

I'm trying out Courier on the blog. Microsoft popularized Times, and we can do better. Courier is fixed-width and resembles typewritten text. I'm in the process of vamping (this version of my blog is too young for it to be considered revamping) this for readability.

Here's the thing: there is peril associated with this brave new era of flickr and blogger, of livejournal and diaryland. Whereas past generations kept records in hard copy, ours keeps them primarily as ephemeral digital copies. Even if you keep backups, the file formats change within a few years and they frequently become impossible to read (go back to something you saved in the late 1990s and see if you can read it on your current computer.)

The interesting thing about this phenomenon is thus that any attempt to access old information faces two issues: there's usually so much of it, and it's so poorly organized, that it's impossible to find anything specific, and the information itself is often either lost, inaccessible due to file format, or corrupted.

I'm thinking of this both because I'm a would-be historian, and as a result I'm supposed to care a lot about historical sources, and because I'm keeping a blog on blogger now, instead of adding to a big ugly HTML file and scp'ing it up to rackm0unt. That means that if I want to see what I was thinking a few years from now and blogger doesn't archive for longer than, say, 12 months (I honestly don't know if they do or not), I'll have no idea, just as people tend to lose their digital photos as they move between computers and cameras and memory cards.

The point is, will historians of the 21st century have blogs and flickr accounts to look through, or will the little piddly records of our lives vanish as hard drives die and backup copies vanish?

I mean, it would just be criminal if people didn't know about our blogs in 100 years.

Wait a minute....