This talk reminded me of the ephemerality of the web. I know it is sort of passé to mention it and everybody has done it at some point or the other.
It’s almost cliché at this point to bemoan the fact that the work we
create as digital designers doesn’t last very long. Whatever we make
is bound to be obsolete, replaced, or just plain gone in a few years
or less.Wilson Miner for The
Manual
That video reminded me of all the cool blog posts or articles I’ve read throughout my life and are sort of lost in the void of the Internet. I’m talking about content that has sort of changed the way I think about something, things that helped me grow, things that helped me move forward. Most of them, simply lost. Sometimes I even write blog posts to avoid that from happening. As in the articles may be lost but my memory of them is not.
Sometimes they are lost because I cannot find them due to not knowing the appropriate search term for Google or forgetting where it was posted. The web is so much bigger by the day, that is getting harder and harder to find things. I feel like nowadays I stumble into things, they somehow come to me but I surely don’t find them, they find me!
Sometimes they are lost because the services that hosted that content closed for some reason or another. Naturally I cannot expect that every company/service is going to be around for 100+ years so that I can consume my esteemed content.
All this keeping in mind that I’m reading a ton of things on the Internet. This year I received an e-mail indicating that I’m among the 1% of top readers in Pocket. I read like 1.5M words averaging something around 30 books. It is sort of a pity to imagine that the best of what I read is going to the trash bin like I do with old newspapers.
I want to have a similar relationship as I do with books or magazines. I want to come back to things that matter from time to time. I want to keep them in my personal library. I want to reference them in some of my conversations. I started using Pinboard in order to attempt doing just that – I’m not taking any chances so I even have a archival account that stores a copy of the content indefinitely! It will take time to curate this online library but I’m planning for the long haul.
P.S.
Maciej Ceglowski from Pinboard has some cool talks: