(Crossposted at my blog (Which is just getting up and running, so if you visit please be kind), and at My Left Wing.)
If you've been in the blogosphere for a while, the chances are good that most of what you have read, historically speaking, is trash. My personal journal, for example, really has little to no historical value, save MAYBE as an example of the "typical" ruminations of a 20-something liberal coming of age in the early 21st century. But what about the ones that ARE important? There is no doubt in my mind that the Blogosphere, on both sides of the political spectrum, has had a huge impact on the way that the American political system functions. The very fact that the Federal Election Committee has called a cross-section of bloggers from across the political spectrum to testify on exemptions from campaign finance law indicates how massively important the blog IN GENERAL has become. Decades from now, historians will want to examine the blog as primary source material for the turbulent era of the early 21st-century earth.
But will they be able to?
As Catherine O'Sullivan notes in a well-written article on the blogging phenomenon for the Spring/Summer 2005
American Archivist (no full text available, but go to your local university library and check it out, good food for thought):
On-line diaries exist not as physical artifacts, but as intangible hypertext documents stored digitally on a server often far-removed from their diarists and readers. They are perpetually revisable, revealing no marks of revision and no traces of previous versions.
. . .
Yet more importantly, the materiality of on-line diaries has profound implications for their survival beyond the life of the diarists.... On-line diaries are inherently unstable objects, constantly changing, sometimes disappearing altogether.
On Daily Kos, the comment threads to a particular diary are often as useful, if not more useful, than the diary itself for inclusion in the historical record. Yet the flood of information that is allowed by the proliferation of community-based blogging systems also creates the problem of server overload and space shortage. Markos, or any blog administrator for that matter, cannot be expected to keep everything ever posted on their sites safely archived away for the rest of eternity. Already, less than 10 months since I signed up for an account with Daily Kos, the vast majority of my comments have vanished from my page. The same, I am sure, will one day happen with the other blogs that I read and on which I post. Eventually, server load will almost certainly be bad enough that diaries and blog posts themselves will be lost, whether from disuse or a simple need to free up space for new contributors to create posts of their own. It is an unavoidable circumstance of the internet, and like most things that can be described with the word "unavoidable", it is also a very unfortunate circumstance.
O'Sullivan herself suggests the Internet Archive as one possible solution to this daunting problem. However, as she admits, the Wayback Machine is not without its share of problems, including an inability to search by text or title, and what O'Sullivan describes as "significant challenges to future researchers if sufficient documentation regarding the context in which they were created or used is not provided." Is a comment at all useful without the post to which it was attached? If a post links to a page which turns out to be a broken link?, does that create a "dead end" in the process of reading the blogs? (I know, for example, that Atrios would be at times indecipherable if his posts were to suddenly drop all of their external links.) Moreover, how do we actually physically preserve the posts for posterity? Store them on a server from here to eternity? Put them onto electronic storage, requiring generation after generation of emulators and migration to hardware that can actually read the storage? Print OUT all of the pages? (I suspect that the mere suggestion of the latter does not do well for my credibility against deforestation.)
So, this whole post is basically a roundabout way of saying that I have no idea what to do about this problem. But even so, it is one the blogosphere community as a whole needs to discuss. Historical research is certainly maddening enough when the documents are written down in physical form; to not have a reliable way of permanently archiving the blog posts of today is likely to drive the historians of the future even more insane than usual.
"'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
--Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias"