Internet Posterity
I am a little bored; and very hot. In search of something to do: Something, productive, to do. I decided to come back to the blog. This will be my grand 7th post for the year. Wow going strong. Which has made me start to consider the foot print I have made, or has been made for me, in the vast interwebs. A few years back, circa 2001, a Google ego search was pretty pointless, but now it can be an interesting thing to do.
For example my name is used for page rank boosting. For those who care I realise that search algorithms are much more complex. My point is simple: the foot print is more like graffiti – all over the place – some good and, well… you get the point. And finally: impossible to eradicate. There is also a prominent GCC mailing list post that is totally misleading bordering on stupidly wrong. More generally, people have covered the web with information. And as my grand total of 7 posts would seem to indicate. Often interest in maintaining that information dies. Thus the information is left to it’s posterity. Whatever that may be.
What follows is just random things I remember. If you want the references look them up yourself.
2008 has been the year we’ve seem explosive growth in the micro-blog (i.e. Facebook / Twitter); the call for “death of blogs” / “long live the blog”; chrome; increased censorship debate; ongoing and expanding delivery of the OLPC; daily mashups helped along by hosted libraries and apis; the smart phone; and so on… We have sufficient disk space to store it all. Search will continue to develop as our gateway to the info. Eventually we may even get a semantic web.
However, what is the ongoing point of dead (i.e. unmaintained) information? What is it’s posterity? Some would argue, as evidenced by the NASA lost ability to read tapes farce, that the posterity is in the accessibility. Others perhaps would lean towards Catch-22: Why not?
Both are valid. But both ignore that it’s not 1300 anymore. You can’t know everything. So I wonder: Are we going to end up with billions of “Fermat’s Last Theorem”-esque pieces of information? Probably. Does it really matter? Probably not.
And so, finally, back to this blog: What is it’s posterity? Hopefully being relevant enough to keep useless information out of the way. But, just as in life, you live for the day, the information here was, is and future posts will continue to be, relevant for their publication date. If you’re reading this in December of 2108: Sorry but I probably can’t help you. Not unless I live to 124. And hey that’d be another piece of information. Because, at least officially, the oldest living person to date is 122. How ironic 