How Spiders (and Blogger) Saved My Blog

I deleted my blog about a week ago. I'd like to say it was an experiment, but it wasn't. The incident occurred in an attempt to delete a group blog that had fallen into disuse. After a day of panicking and then emailing Blogger and my digital history professor, I calmed down. I discovered (with help and advice from a special someone) that I could recover my deleted posts by searching their titles on Google.

Instead of clicking on the title of my blog post, I clicked on Cached. This turned up Google's cache, or archive, of my blog. I then copied and pasted the text and pictures into my new/old blog (After deleting my blog, I immediately reserved the same domain name and title by re-registering for a blog on Blogger). I was delighted, and even more so when I realized my links remained active.

I couldn't help but think of how my experience tied into my previous blogs about Internet archiving and Facebook. If I delete my blog again, by accident or otherwise, my posts and ideas have been archived by Google's life-saving spiders and are available for anyone to access. I can't help but think of the amount of resources this might provide future researchers or historians.

But I don't need to repeat my previous posts, you can read them for yourself now that I have successfully restored them. I am thankful I was able to recover my blog and I have Google's creepy, crawly spiders to thank for taking snapshots of my blog and archiving it before it was deleted.

P.S. After posting this entry I promptly received an email from a helpful Blogger employee informing me that they had restored my old blog. Moral of the story? There is a lot of archiving and caching going on and, as a result, no blog need ever be lost again!

The Tudor's Brangelina

Whether we admit it or not, most of us like to read about the divorces and break-ups of Hollywood’s stars. It’s a guilty pleasure. It’s also part of our star-crazed culture, this fascination with movie, rock/pop, and sports celebrities. But we shouldn’t think of their divorces and relationship failures as products of our contemporary society. The famous, it seems, have always been like this.

Take Katherine of Aragon, the first wife of the infamous King Henry VIII of England. Her story resembles that of modern castaway, Jennifer Aniston, replaced by Angelina Jolie as Brad Pitt’s lover. A daughter of the king and queen of Spain, Katherine was used as a pawn for Anglo-Spanish relations. She was married to Arthur, heir to the English crown, for just one year before his death caused chaos in the court. Katherine was driven into poverty and neglected by both Spain and England. She lived that way for 8 years before catching the eye of the young Henry, Arthur’s brother. After receiving an official annulment for her first marriage, they were married. The royal marriage was rife with affairs and miscarriages, producing only one daughter. After 24 years, Henry divorced poor, innocent Katherine on the grounds that the Bible warns of never marrying a brother’s widow. For Henry, however, the break-up occurred because Katherine did not produce a male heir and because another woman, Anne Boleyn, was waiting in the wing.

A Medieval Angelina Jolie, Boleyn became known for her own affairs and love of witchcraft; the punishment for which was decapitation. One can only hope that Jolie’s fate is less bloody.

An unexpected part II

I'd like to take some time to respond to a comment I received pertaining to my previous post. I love reading the few comments that I receive but this one, written by French Panic, particularly irked me because I felt the writer did not fully understand my point of view. Alas, the rebuttal.

The beauty of Facebook is that all of the information stored on individual profiles can be accessed via the Internet which, barring all unforeseen circumstances, has a lifespan of many years to come. I recognize that digital sources are fallible. So do archivists and computer engineers - they are adapting to this realization. Google and Facebook are working to figure out where and how to store their massive caches. My point wasn't that Facebook should be hiring archivists to store profile information on software/hardware that will be obsolete in 2 years, but rather that Facebook accounts can be accessed easily over the Internet and that this could benefit researchers, historians, and other archivists in the years to come if the Internet is still available and Facebook allows this sort of access (perhaps in the same way the National Library and Archives allows access to its restricted materials upon the death of a donor or other stipulation). As it is, Facebook has amended their policy regarding deceased users. The previous policy was that an account was deleted after a 30 day "memorialization period", but after pressure from families and friends, the "memorialization period" is now indefinite.

And yes, Facebook is a massive repository. The term repository refers to anything from a permanent archive collection to a garbage can that is emptied every week. The National Library and Archives, another massive repository, is constantly changing - accessioning and deaccessioning records all the time. Although Facebook users can add, change, or delete their profiles whenever they log in, the information they provide is similar to that which a historian would find in a diary written by an upper-class white woman of the 19th century. In fact, I think Facebook could provide historians with a broader view of the population with accounts created by people all over the world and of many different income brackets. Anyone that has access to the Internet (accessed via personal computers, library computers, friends' computers), can post pictures, a blog, or create a Facebook profile.

The difference between Facebook and the 19th century diary, however, is that the diary provides historians with a more personal perspective. As opposed to a diary, blogs and social networking websites are written and created with the knowledge that other people will read them. This does not take away from their value. These kinds of digital sources can shed light on a particular person's interests as well as society as a whole - popular forms of entertainment, social and political debates, and how we interact with each other (Marshall McLuhan's "medium is the message" comes to mind). The information on Facebook, and more generally the Internet, can help historians and researchers to build a framework of our society.

The Internet has given us a way to learn about each other. French Panic was able to connect to my blog and paste his/her response to my previous post. It has opened up an avenue of debate that would not have previously existed. If the Internet, and thus this debate, lasts for future generations to read, I wonder if they will look up my Facebook profile.

How Facebook changed the world...

I was listening to CBC Radio's Here and Now yesterday afternoon when I was struck by a story concerning the new computer fad, Facebook. Apparently, Microsoft bought a piece (1.6% to be exact) of the the social networking mogul for $240 million. Along with with this not-so-large chunk of the Facebook pie (the website is worth around $15 billion and its creator, Mark Zuckerburg is worth almost $5 billion), Microsoft now has a role in Facebook's advertising and future claims to more of the company as it continues to grow and gain popularity - and it will, said Here and Now's technology-minded Jesse Hirsh.

What is even more interesting was the discussion that followed. Hirsh and the Here and Now host, Matt Galloway, talked about this Facebook-Microsoft pairing as the way of the future in terms of operating systems. Indeed, both Google and Microsoft are tending toward programs and applications that allow the user to connect to people, hotels, restaurants, and other services throughout the world (I am thinking here of the ideas expressed in the clever video clip Epic 2015). Hirsh mentioned that Facebook, with its ever growing application options, is used more and more instead of email and as a form of entertainment with games and other interesting features. Why not, Hirsh mused, create spreadsheets and word documents on Facebook too?

Why not indeed! Part of Facebook's allure to major computer companies like Microsoft, is its seemingly indefinite access to marketing information. Users of Facebook can post their activities, interests, favourite books and television shows, and even products they prefer; and now, Microsoft is right there, watching, making note that one of Sarah's (and many others, to be sure) favourite television shows is The Hills. The next time I sign in I might be prodded with ads offering me deals on Hills memorabilia or cautioned not to miss the next episode or informed of Hills related events in my area.

In addition to operating systems and marketing, Facebook is also a massive archive and digital repository. Everytime users add to their profile it is recorded and whoever has access to this added information, particularly photos, can copy it (read: archive it). If the Facebook fad lasts long enough and profiles are accessible 100 years from now, historians, archivists, and researchers of the future will have interesting, detailed, and almost complete accounts of the lives of millions of people (the Toronto, ON network itself contains 900 000 people!). What this speaks of in terms of privacy is probably the subject for another blog.

Today's society, it seems, is very concerned with this idea of documenting and recording everything, especially our daily lives. There's Gordon Bell who undertook a project to digitally archive every photo, piece of paper, and action of his life. Even weirder is Johnny Lechner, a guy who has been in college since 1994 and who is recording every minute of his final (one can only hope) college year and broadcasting it online (you should definitely watch it for a bit).

Obviously people are interested in this kind of archiving - we are posting information on Facebook and other social networking sites, newspapers and magazines are writing about people like Gordon Bell, we are watching (voyeurism?) Johnny go to school, and we are blogging! In 100 years historians are going to use this information to build a framework of and learn about our society. Some people, pessimists, I'm sure, believe that all of this archiving and information collecting will cast a negative light on our time. But they way I see it is that these sorts of websites, Facebook and even Johnny Lechner, connect all of us. If we have the ability to document our daily lives so that others in different countries and cultures can read about it and maybe learn something they otherwise wouldn't have, then why not?