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By David Rothman

bethwellingtonThe nasty ifs linger on for people who entrusted Yahoo 360 with their blog posts, and Joseph Dunphy has written an eloquent cry for help. Granted, Yahoo obviously viewed 360 as just an experiment. So a shutdown was hardly out of the question. In fact, that made it all the more important for Yahoo from the start to take steps to help bloggers and others preserve their work. In his plea, Dunphy reasonably asks:

“Who is going to invest real effort into creating a page that is likely to evaporate when Yahoo finds yet another new toy? A service run on those terms becomes the kind of place where people will make a halfhearted effort to throw up any old garbage just to establish a presence, before wandering off to Myspace and Blogger, and like it or not, the quality of what your users are uploading affects the reputation of your service, and its ability to attract new users.”

Overlap with e-book storage issue

Notice the overlap with my post this morning calling for assurances that people will always be able to access their ‘protected’ e-books? I love the Net and the opportunities it is creating for companies of all sizes, but short-term corporate interests mustn’t come at the expense of netizens—whether they’re buying e-books for the long-term or expecting their blog posts to remain accessible.

Might the Internet Archive help in some way? Perhaps work with commercial sites to establish a preservation standard and specifically allow the Archive to make regular backups? Ideally Yahoo-type companies could even subsidize such efforts and use them to assure netizens that they were indeed posting for keeps—that corporate whims wouldn’t wipe out their hard work. If nothing else, as I’ve noted in the past, I hope that the Archive will offer reliable preservation to bloggers who pay for it, although “free” would be be better.

Annotated e-books: Another storage problem ahead?

Meanwhile let’s look ahead to the era of annotated e-books. How durable will be people’s annotations inside books? I’m not talking about casual comments, but rather about entire essays, which the technology will make possible. The IDPF could help tremendously with annotations standards, as could a library-related alliance to help assure permanent storage of comments made within books. Both Jon Noring and I and the past have discussed the need to take annotations seriously, and I hope the e-book industry will heed if it truly wants e-books to go beyond the capabilities of paper. Perhaps well-backed up annotations servers can exist independent of book servers in some cases.

The TeleRead angle

Of course, a comprehensive, integrated TeleRead-style approach, which I’ve been advocating since the early ’90s, would be the ultimate storage solution—just so it could be structured so as not to pre-empt the private sector, which if nothing else we need to assure freedom of express.

Technicality: The comments might actually exist as separate files. But readers would actually see the comments and/or links within the books. This is already a reality by way of systems such as Sophie and BookGlutton.

Related: Tens of thousands of page views since January ’06—but Yahoo still dissed Beth Wellington’s clueful blog on politics and culturel. So far an Yahoo PR woman has not responded to query I wrote a week ago or so. Exactly what will Yahoo do to help Beth Wellington and others move their blogs without loss of images or the use of the blogs’ internal links?

 
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