The digital era brought with it the promise of indefinite memory. Increased computing power and disk space combined with decreasing costs were supposed to make anything born digital possible to store for ever. But digital data often has a surprisingly short life. “If we’re not careful, we will know more about the beginning of the 20th century than the beginning of the 21st century,” says Adam Farquhar, who is in charge the British Library’s digital-preservation efforts. (via Digital archiving: History flushed | The Economist)

The digital era brought with it the promise of indefinite memory. Increased computing power and disk space combined with decreasing costs were supposed to make anything born digital possible to store for ever. But digital data often has a surprisingly short life. “If we’re not careful, we will know more about the beginning of the 20th century than the beginning of the 21st century,” says Adam Farquhar, who is in charge the British Library’s digital-preservation efforts. (via Digital archiving: History flushed | The Economist)

"This is the dilemma of being a cyborg: It’s not just that everything we once committed to memory we now store externally on devices that crash or become obsolete or are rendered temporarily inaccessible due to lack of coverage. And it’s not that we spend a lot of time storing, organizing, pruning and maintaining our access to it all. It’s that we’re collectively engaged in a mass conversion of what we used to call, variously, records, accounts, entries, archives, registers, collections, keepsakes, catalogs, testimonies and memories into, simply, data."
The Dilemma of Being a Cyborg - NYTimes.com
To me, the result of this consolidation that gives me cause for concern is the fundamental integration of my entire digital life. When you start pulling together email data with browser data, that really begins to paint a near-complete picture of a life lived on the internet. It’s not just search terms, not just circles of friends. It’s every last digital scrap of me. As we’ve moved to cloud-based services, browsers have become the first and perhaps the only application we need to open to get things done on our computers or our phones. I’ve come to terms with the fact that the convenience of internet-enabled life involves a data trail, but now Google is demanding free reign (March 1 going forward) to piece those data trails together with all the other bits of information it has collected about us. (via Use Google? Time to Get Real About Protecting Your Digital Self - Sara Marie Watson - Technology - The Atlantic)

To me, the result of this consolidation that gives me cause for concern is the fundamental integration of my entire digital life. When you start pulling together email data with browser data, that really begins to paint a near-complete picture of a life lived on the internet. It’s not just search terms, not just circles of friends. It’s every last digital scrap of me. As we’ve moved to cloud-based services, browsers have become the first and perhaps the only application we need to open to get things done on our computers or our phones. I’ve come to terms with the fact that the convenience of internet-enabled life involves a data trail, but now Google is demanding free reign (March 1 going forward) to piece those data trails together with all the other bits of information it has collected about us. (via Use Google? Time to Get Real About Protecting Your Digital Self - Sara Marie Watson - Technology - The Atlantic)

bitly blog: You just shared a link. How long will people pay attention? →

bitly:

How long is a link “alive” before people stop caring? Does it matter what kind of content it is, or where you shared it? At bitly we see a lot of links, and while every link is special, we’re learning a few general principles that we can share.
 
Let’s take a look at one particular story - Baby otter befriended by orphaned kittens

But that doesn’t mean digital preservation is pointless: if we’re going to save even a fraction of the trillions of bits of data churned out every year, we can’t think of digital preservation in the same way we do paper preservation. We have to stop thinking about how to save data only after it’s no longer needed, as when an author donates her papers to an archive. Instead, we must look for ways to continuously maintain and improve it. In other words, we must stop preserving digital material and start curating it. (via When Data Disappears - NYTimes.com)

But that doesn’t mean digital preservation is pointless: if we’re going to save even a fraction of the trillions of bits of data churned out every year, we can’t think of digital preservation in the same way we do paper preservation. We have to stop thinking about how to save data only after it’s no longer needed, as when an author donates her papers to an archive. Instead, we must look for ways to continuously maintain and improve it. In other words, we must stop preserving digital material and start curating it. (via When Data Disappears - NYTimes.com)

"We like to hack hardware and software, why not hack our bodies?” says Tim Chang, a self-quantifier and Silicon Valley investor who is backing the development of several self-tracking gadgets."
FT.com / FT Magazine - Invasion of the body hackers