All About Blogging

Lost Blogs And Data, Lost History

The phenomenon of lost blogs highlights a problem that's becoming apparent with digital data collection in general. More and more details of people's private lives are ending up online, whether they are posted in a personal blog, a social network, or even a site for uploading public photos. It's well-known among data management professionals that it only takes three generations of new technology before they lose the ability to read anything from four technological generations ago.

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?

Historians can still study cuneiform tablets and reconstruct the history of Babylon, or read Egyptian tomb records and learn what happened in that country 4000 years ago. And because of personally written journals and accounts, America's founding history is well known. But today's history may be lost as technology changes. Alter the blogging software of a few sites just enough over the next 20 years, and the news, analysis and personal reflections of millions of people will be gone. A blog may correspond to the papers of older historical figures, but the technology makes it less easy to preserve.

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 people continue to embrace new technologies and recognize the expense of constantly upgrading their data into the new formats, many resign themselves to lost records. Both the ordinary person as well as news makers and analysts who publish weblogs may eventually vanish from the digital record. Even just deleting one's own email could erase documents that might have helped future historians understand the events of this time period. This could be a devastating loss.

Related Topics About Lost

Blogging
For every great blog on the internet there are hundreds of others that are nothing more than garbage. Who cares if your dish disposal stopped working or your child has trouble with potty training? The key to successful blogging is writing about things people are genuinely interested in. And if you own a business then a blog can be a great way to get the information out to thousands of people.

Video Blogging
The possibilities for blogging keep expanding, with the latest stage of development being video blogging. This takes blog entries to a whole new level, beyond the static text-based type, or even posts with some photos and other graphics, into a much more dynamic and immediate realm. Blog posts come alive in a whole new way, and establish the blogger as an intermediary between the formerly divided spheres of text and video.

What Is The Use
All of these things can encompass what is the use of blogging. Whether you need a more solitary online venue for recording your thoughts and reflections, or look to a gossip site for news about the rich and famous, or want to become active in a blog community, the avenues are all open. Private or more public, every blog is much more than merely a place to save text, graphics, videos and photos.