Full story is here

There’s a lot of stuff I’ve held onto that I thought at the time I would never want to read again, but in seeing it there now found pretty useful. Example: all the cover letters I sent out when I was looking for a job a few years ago. Aside from being hilarious, I can see which ones people responded to and which ones people didn’t.

Also, an individual Twitter message is pretty worthless to me (as it is read live), but the aggregate of them is informative about my thought processes and routines at the time. Same goes for email in a lot of cases.

All this is YMMV, but I think it’s good to have an anthropological record even if you have no plans of revisiting it and sifting through it. Disk space is cheap, losing something valuable because you didn’t think it was important at the time could be expensive.

This is an interesting post. For a long time, the reason I was so resistant to services like Facebook & Twitter was that I wouldn’t own my content anymore – but the conversation has kind of moved away from blogs, and I didn’t want to get left behind. In some ways, the interactions on these newer social media sites are richer than on my old blog. In some ways, not.

Anyway, the post did inspire me to make a PDF copy of my old blog. I’m about half-way through, and will probably make a few different back-ups of it to stash away. I may look into ways to back up some of my FB content, too, which is essentially where a lot of the energy spent blogging has shifted to.

In regards to backing things up – I do think the lines about what is valuable enough to warrant a back-up get kind of fuzzy. Is every single text message I send really worth holding onto? Every IM? Every @ message on Twitter? How are these things substantially different than an off-hand remark in conversation? If we save EVERYTHING, especially now that we are generating so much content, we run into the problem of not being able to pick out the items that really “mean something.” I think this post is valuable, though, because it makes people start thinking about these issues – and forces them to determine how much of their content they really want to trust with a 3rd party.