Slashdot Mirror

An image of chicken little crying about how the sky is fallilng to get eyes on their osdn ads.
Seriously, articles about how there might be an astroid with our number or that a piece of the Canary Islands might fall into the ocean creating a tsunami mere days after the disaster in southeast Asia is not journalism. Since I'm not new here, I know that Slashdot is about journalism.
It's about end-of-the-world histrionics with the much-abused torino scale, how Microsoft will 0wn us all without the savior of teh Lunix, articles which are really product placement and sometimes a rare submission which really is "stuff that matters".
Next on Slashdot: Roland Piquepaille reports a company is selling blueprints to build a dirty bomb! Cheap!

An image of chicken little crying about how the sky is fallilng to get eyes on their osdn ads.
Seriously, articles about how there might be an astroid with our number or that a piece of the Canary Islands might fall into the ocean creating a tsunami mere days after the disaster in southeast Asia is not journalism. Since I'm not new here, I know that Slashdot is about journalism.
It's about end-of-the-world histrionics with the much-abused torino scale, how Microsoft will 0wn us all without the savior of teh Lunix, articles which are really product placement and sometimes a rare submission which really is "stuff that matters".
Next on Slashdot: reports a company is selling blueprints to build a dirty bomb! Cheap!

If for nothing else, without you there would never have been Camwhores!

Well, I know I like these fine ladies just plenty.

Uh, hold on a sec, I've got to go write a business plan and call some friends of mine at Google.

No joke. Give me a call if you get anything started.

I seriously doubt in 10 years if most weblogs entries from today will still be around in any form.

You may be right. I would hope that more companies become active in archival projects, ala the Wayback Machine, but if they can't make any money on it for 50 years, it'll be tough. Perhaps the job should be done by history book publishers who are reasonably certain that they will be around in 50 years... or at least know they'll be able to sell it to whoever replaces them.

So get back on the phone to Google, tell them we know who's footing the bill. =)

Do you think most people don't want to back-up their blogs? I tend to think that people won't just abandon their diaries, and that they must have considered the difference in terms of longevity between weblogging and traditional diaries. Perhaps it should be people saving backup CDROMs in their paper correspondence and photo boxes.

Now I could totally see someone not having proper backups in place in case of total hard-drive failure, or their hosting company going out of business without advance notice. These folks (myself included ;) will probably have to be burned once before they start taking backups seriously. But everyone else will probably want to keep their blog around in some form or another for posterity.

To blogging software developers: solve our problems! Incorporate easy backup and flat-text export utilities into your software, and encourage your users to make periodic backups.

To bloggers: think about how interesting every random scrap of information you think of will be in the future. Your trip to the mall, what you told Jeanette the other day, the economies of trading webcam pictures to lonely geeks for goodies from Amazon, everything. So back it up! Use blogging software with a backup feature, and keep a record that you can look at in 40 years, and show to your kids (depending on what your kids are into ; )

Wil. Not because he switched to linux, but because his story included a pointer to pr0n. Get your head in the game, Apple, you're losing serious points here!

--Jim

Stile Project (a haven of rather vile material) and Camwhores got around it just by using standard load-balancing techniques.

Meh, if there's any site worth blocking, it's Stile's.