Blog Curation Economics

Many years ago, even before the Web, Michael Lesk (then leader of BellCore's information science research) observed that for a fixed annual cost one need never throw anything (digital) away again.  The increase in the capacity-per-dollar of disk space would offset the increase in bits to be stored.  It is an appealing rule of thumb, a corollary of Moore's Law that computing has benefited from since about the time I was born. 

A recent discussion with a colleague about blogs-as-artifacts-of-discourse returned me to the recurring question of blog curation, and why the dickens is the library community not doing this???  The answer inevitably harkens back to too much to do and too few resources to do it with (though, one might factor in the vision thing as well).

If Lesk and Moore are still right, what is the endowment cost of a blog?  How much should one have to pay to assure that the words and images  committed to our modest vanity publishing efforts are retained indefinitely in the record of public  discourse?  And what if, as your blog pings the archive to come slurp up your latest and greatest, it returns to you a canonical, persistent, globally-scoped identifier to boot?

Seems like an affordable model that would benefit authors and the community, the cost of which (to authors) should be quite low.

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Brasilia at dawn (by the author, July 2007)

Comments

[Bob Robertson-Boyd]

So noted! :-)

Have you seen the Boxes and Arrows article on "THe Hidden History of Information Management?" It regards curation and information management.

[stu]

I should be so prolific ;-)

[Andrew]

Stu

the cost/data quantity ratio may be improving according to Moore's Law but here's the thing: in the big research sciences domain, the quantity of data being produced will very soon exceed the available storage capacity of the entire planet. In the biotechnology domain I was told this will happen in the next 2 years or so. Nightmares...

[Adam Chandler]

If preserving blogs is such a good idea, why isn't OCLC doing it?

[Chris Rusbridge]

Bryan Lawrence, who runs the British Atmospheric Data Centre, made a similar comment to me a year or so ago. Paraphrased, it was: "If you pay me to manage your data for the first 3 years, and I get more such commissions into the future from other folks, the cost of managing your data will be so much in the small change that I won't need more money for it..."

[Bruce]

I don't know why the library community isn't pursuing a curatorial solution, but it seems other folks are.

How about "The Way Back Machine" at the Internet Archive - http://www.archive.org/web/web.php or the people behind the International Journal of Digital Curation - http://www.ijdc.net/ijdc/issue/current ? Or Google, they must have some high-MIPsters from the library sciences on staff.