Future Generations Blog

The Web is now old enough for us to know just how badly links rot over time. Much of the material from the early days of the Web is already gone. Facebook and Twitter actually make it nearly impossible for you to find older material, even stuff that you’ve contributed yourself. The more dynamic the Web gets and the more stuff we move into “the cloud,” the less confident we can be that information that once was public will remain available to the public. There are conferences on “digital preservation” these days because this is actually a serious and important problem. We need to solve it for the sake of future historians and for the sake of our descendants. We need, as Dave Winer puts it, to “future-safe” the culture we are creating together today. In other words: I’m a lot less worried about the Web that never forgets than I am about the Web that can’t remember.