Armageddon Safe Archives

Dave Winer brings up the very important issue of preserving all of our collective musings after we've passed on. Since my near-death experience on 7/7/07, I can relate. I've got 120Gb+ of photos and video, and they're not even all on one box. I definitely need to clean my act up, filter it down a bit, and get the metadata in a good state.

Think of it (my photos, this blog, etc) as a diary for the 21st century.

Think of our blogs in this framework. The manuscripts that did survive throughout history are still around because they had value to their consecutive owners, or had sufficiently small cost that to keep them was either very easy or accidental. (In my humble guestimation)

I figure if I can boil things down to a stack of 50 DVDs or less, and keep everything in that stack, my family will keep it around for a while. Especially if I explicitly label things and make it valuable for them by keeping it VERY organized and user-friendly.

I figure that I'd be willing to keep at least 1 DVD worth of stuff for anyone who cares to send it to me. I'd be willing to share that much live disk space as well. (No pun intended)

I'd be very interested in figuring out how to suck down complete copies of everything written by Dave Winer, Doc Searls, Dave Rogers and others. The text certainly would be small... photos and video might be a bit tougher.

Usenet archives are still around because the network was distributed, and some folks kept copies of things they found valuable. Perhaps it's time to think of the web as merely one of many transport and storage mechanisms for our collective stuff.

This folds into the title of this post... Armageddon Safe Archives. If something really bad happens, how can we maximize the value and minimize the cost of archiving things for the future. We need to make it easy and desirable to keep copies of each others stuff. Perhaps a new bit needs to be added to the Creative Commons licensing to handle archival copies?

Comments thoughts and discussion welcome.

--Mike--