This is kind of a short, technical footnote to my last essay. There I linked to an older blog post from Dave Winer, just one of many of his on this subject. Today he writes how we should archive blogs before we worry about Twitter:
“With Twitter there’s a rich corporation minding it. They can and imho should be funding their own archive. But with the historic blogosphere, dating back to the early-mid 90s, a lot of it is already gone. The need to preserve it, by independent historians and librarians, is greater than the need for Twitter to be publicly archived.”
I have a lot to say on this, and I can’t wait to share a new web project that I started recently which could play a small roll in blog backups. When I killed off my little app Wii Transfer, I did so to refocus Riverfold around preservation. I wrote:
“It also doesn’t fit into a new theme I have for Riverfold: apps that are all about keeping and remembering what matters. For Clipstart, that’s family videos. For Tweet Library and Tweet Marker Plus, that’s old tweets.”
Dave mentions libraries several times in his blog post. It’s no accident that the word “library” is in Tweet Library’s name; my ambition for this app far outpaces my coding speed. But blogs are a different problem, and they need something special — perhaps multiple solutions.
