Think about it: You go to work for an online “newspaper,” which is really a blog. And then they pull the plug. What happens to the millions of words written, the documentation, the history, the feeling that the publication brought? It’s all flat-out gone forever.
Carter Maness, who writes the blog linked to below, speaks aptly of what I call the Digital Desert. It’s the absence of historical information that’s starting a few years back and will extend into the near future. (Until the Robot Uprising, of course.) All our records, all our comments, all our history is around only as long as someone pays money for the electrons.
What Carter discovered that his million words were absent when he tried to prove his work history. The publications were gone, the websites were gone, everything vanished.
While you can go through the Internet Wayback Machine to view an old site, it’s not an official document. In fact, the Wayback Machine could vanish as well. Google or Facebook could decide that anything digital prior to 10 years ago isn’t worth storing. Then poof!
I’m glad that I’m still doing books.
