In my "How to set up a blog" demonstration for the Creative Writers class, I had emphasised that anyone taking up blogging should consider carefully what they put in that blog because once their words or images are out there in wwwland they remain out there - always. Jo's question, posed in her article below: "Where does it all go?" got me thinking.
In the TAFE lesson we'd discussed the blush-inducing power of content you might have written if you were blogging during your teenage years: the Bridget Jones's Diary type musings or "world peace" naivety expressed in rhyme.
Blogging is a melding of the words 'web' and 'log' and began as a very personal mode of expression. The web is replete with journals that express the writer's every thought or opinion on anything at all. Hard to read and I suspect rarely read by web users, other than those who have a very personal connection with the blogger.
These days blogs are used by big business and small, by community groups and networks; and blogs that get read usually do have quality content. The best of them communicate high levels of expertise in whichever field they represent.
So where would 25 year old Jonti's teenage blog diary go if it was deleted five year's ago? Part of the answer is here at the www archive. You can ask to have your site crawled and archived or you can prevent it from being archived. You can even have it removed from the archive if it's already there.
I'm not sure that this is the whole answer to Jo's query, but it is where you'll find old web content. You could easily locate our Jonti's site in www.archive.org if you have her site's full URL (address).
So will you stumble upon Jonti's diary-blog accidentally while googling something else, and embarrass her in absentia? Extremely unlikely. But that's another story.
Author: Julie Briggs
No comments:
Post a Comment