Lost Blogs And Data, Lost History

Viewing digital data from an historical perspective, the prospect of lost history looms as a very real threat. It may not seem that the deletion or loss of a few personal blogs could have that much of an effect, but the phenomenon is a symptom of something larger. Professionals in data management know too well that as a technology develops through four generations, the data created with the methods of the first generation finally becomes unreadable. This has implications for everything from blogs to photos hosted on websites to other kinds of records.

The situation with digital data parallels earlier changes in music technology. Think of the progression from cylinders to flat vinyl albums to cassette and 8-track tapes to CDs, not to mention mp3s. Who can play those music cylinders now? Similarly, a person's digital diary on a 5 ¼" floppy disk would now be almost unreadable, as technology has progressed through 3 1/2" disks to CD-ROM to flash drives. All that music and all that data is simple gone. If a person writes data about their whole life on blog entries, and the hosting company goes out of business, then where are that person's thoughts and reflections?

Ironically, ancient records in archaic formats may be longer-lasting than digital data that can easily be lost. Historians can reconstruct Babylonian history from cuneiform tablets, and Egyptian history from hieroglyphs on monuments. Even America's early history will remain known because it was written on paper, in letters, personal accounts and other documents. But if the software for blogging changes drastically in the next few decades, millions of blogs containing accounts and analysis of today's history could become unreadable. Blogs are less easily preserved than a clay tablet or even a paper book.

On a smaller scale, blogs themselves are constantly vanishing, as people move them to new servers, start new ones, or simply stop updating altogether. Members of a blogging community, having no other way of knowing the person, lose touch and may never discover what happened to their friend. The blog posts sit there until the host site archives them or deletes them for inactivity, and the person is gone from online history.

As record-keeping continues switch to digital formats and away from paper that might still have been readable a century or two from now, the question of lost records grows in importance. The expense alone of continually upgrading records to new, technological formats is very high, so as people rush headlong into those technologies, they simply resign themselves to losing older data. With the disappearance of the weblogs of ordinary people, as well as those making history, and even people's simple deletion of their own email, data is vanishing that might leave huge gaps in the future understanding of current world events.

Related topics about lost
Journaling Versus Blogging
The types of entries made in journaling are different than those made in a more public blog, meaning that the basic requirements of the writer will differ as well. Their needs may vary from something that allows less complicated blog entries, like the Diaryland site, or a place where they can play and write more elaborately, like WordPress. Often this more personal blog will even be hosted on the same site as a public gossip blog, yet the two will be almost nothing alike.

World of Blogging
Do you have something to say and you want to get that message out to the rest of the world? It may be just some interesting facts about your life. It could be an informative article that helps others. It could also be an article that contains links to something you are selling or want to convince others to sell.

Celebrity Blogging
It's likely that these news blogs, perhaps better described as gossip blogs, came first, and that part of the reason celebrity blogs began to appear was in response to these, so the stars could take back some control of their image. But for a few years, blogs that gossiped about celebrities reigned supreme. This was no surprise, of course, since wildly popular newspaper tabloids like the National Enquirer and magazines like People had been serving a similar purpose for decades.