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.
-----
Brasilia at dawn (by the author, July 2007)
