> I can't think of anything more ephemeral and useless than blog comments--does it really matter whether those are backed up for the ages?
You might be surprised. Archaeologists are forced to derive much of what they know about vanished cultures from bits of ephemera from their daily lives -- things you'd find in a midden heap, like shards of discarded pottery, spat-out plant seeds and gnawed animal bones, and the like. Why? Because those are the things that survived.
Would our understanding of those cultures be richer if we could hear their songs and read their poetry? Undoubtedly. But we can learn an awful lot about them from their ephemera, even without that.
If we're worried about archaeologists, we should inscribe our blogs on stone tablets and bury them underneath our houses. Short of that, backup tapes will decay, hard drives will fail, and if the data somehow stays alive in the "cloud" in a form that's accessible to archaeologists of the future, then they'll surely have an utter surfeit of data.
You might be surprised. Archaeologists are forced to derive much of what they know about vanished cultures from bits of ephemera from their daily lives -- things you'd find in a midden heap, like shards of discarded pottery, spat-out plant seeds and gnawed animal bones, and the like. Why? Because those are the things that survived.
Would our understanding of those cultures be richer if we could hear their songs and read their poetry? Undoubtedly. But we can learn an awful lot about them from their ephemera, even without that.