Digital Permanence

Manton Reece^cited wrote some sensible words about the permanence of material on the Internet, and Dave Winer^cited followed suit shortly after (and then again^cited). It’s an important topic.

We need places — secure, digital, permanent places — to store things. It’s not a particularly difficult problem, at least to attempt to solve. (Of course, we won’t really know if we’ve succeded for another few hundred years.) So we should try!

A couple of ideas that I’m using as a baseline these days:

1. Store things in open formats, so we can continue to read them.
2. Store things in a small number of large (and non-esoteric!) repositories (i.e. filesystems, or drives, or websites, or whatever), so they’re easy to migrate to other places.

The latter is, I think, important: it means that the data can be easily handed over to someone else.