Let me say first that I really like the idea of WebCite, as it does allow preservation of content, but I just disagree with the particular way the project is going about it. He proposes that all citations of URLs go through WebCite, which would be a fine idea, except there’s no guarantee that WebCite, or any other site, will remain accessible. It seems like a much better idea to me to have that content archived multiple places and accessible via lookup of a unique identifier or something, so you’re not dead in the water if the one site goes down.

Of course, it’s easy to be a critic, and a centralized archive is better than no archive, at least for the immediate future.

As of right now, the best platform for a professional blogging is IMO TypePad: minimal cost, technical knowledge needed + maximum value and impact. But I do take your point re waking up one fine day to find a huge part of your professional output gone, or unavailable.

I’d bet sometime in 2008 an enterprising microISV will take Moveable Type (now open source) + Amazon Web Services + a good AdWords targeted campaign and build something to address this new “digital lifestyle” need. At least I hope so!

Not sure about the “worth preserving” part, but the rest has been happening for a while, but that still does not address the concern/question Jon raises, unless I am missing something.

Still, what? You have everything you need to recover your site in five minutes or less. Would it help to have the backups notarized?

Don’t like a blogspot weblog address? Buy a domain, host your site where you can use it.

Want to make sure your pages stay online until the end of time? Leave a lot of money when you die.

Want to make sure your writing lasts forever? Write something worth preserving.

As far as I can tell from a glimpse, at least a large portion of Ben Toth’s old blog content, is alive and well over there, which means it can be retrieved and reconstructed. A dedicated assurance service like you suggest might be the preferred solution to the problem in general, but until then and none the less, one can make use of the available tools before “starting over”. Surprisingly enough, quite often I find even veteran netizens seems to neglect checking and using that option. Hence the reminder.

Here is the earliest entry of nelh.blogspot.com, as archived at the Internet Archive (26/08/2002-28/09/2002) -
http://preview.tinyurl.com/2uz74g

and here is the complete list of its archived entries over there -
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://nelh.blogspot.com/
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Thanks for all the excellent writing.

True. There are also, however, business arrangements whereby commercial services federate and cover for one another. Insurance, for example.

Sure. Of course you’d like it to be the case that that, as and when you realize you’ve begun to accrue value in the thing, it’s straightforward to migrate it to a more robust setting.

Agreed. I don’t want you to pay for it. Rather, /I/ want to pay to assure that you will have reliable long-term access to it, that things you remember reading can be found later, that things you point to will resolve, etc.

Of course, Blogger is backed by Google, and at the moment that seems safe. But I’d feel pretty much the same about wordpress.com; the company that backs wordpress.com might fail, but I think the service will probably live on even then because their infrastructure is solid enough that the maintenance is small compared to the value of the asset.

This all feels industrial to me in a way. For instance, after a certain point you can’t really pay more money to get a more reliable car. It actually seems to go backwards (though this was more true in the past), where really expensive cars were more unreliable. The way things scale, it’s only by scaling bigger that you can get decent return on reliability (when that reliability doesn’t require human intervention). Rich people have mechanics and assistants to take their car to the mechanic and whatnot. Big companies have IT people futzing with their systems. There’s a lot of overhead though; you need HR people for the IT people, or someone to keep track of your cars’ maintenance schedule. It’s not just expensive, it’s painful and demotivating and a headache. You can’t always pay to remove that kind of overhead.