On the Internet Nobody Knows You?re a Dog

Restoring Old Records to your computer

Today I learned a new trick about submitting your site to search engines. Find sites that allow you to add links to their page. For example, I typed in google, ?add url fiction writer? and found several online directories for writers, many of which allowed you to have a personal page with a url. Because these sites are already listed in the major search engines, it’s relatively easy for a search spider to find your url on that site the next time it plows through the directory.

Also, I found this great search engine reference.

Today for about the third time I have written the creator of a web page I liked only to find that the person is in school or in an old folk?s home. It is always a surprise. Perhaps these are the people with the most time on their hands.

Here’s a rather fun thread about whether books will ever go extinct. The argument devolves into typical usenet bickering midway through, but they raise some interesting points. A book never really goes extinct unless absolutely every single copy of it is obliterated. Even though books are regularly tossed into the trashheap, it seems very unlikely that every single copy will be lost. As long as there?s a single copy that people can find, then books are a reliable medium

Besides, how do we know the ASCII or ISO standards will be with us? And just imagine 200 years from now archivists trying to dig up a Netscape web browser with which to understand an html code. I?m sure it?s doable, but it adds further layers of complexity into the translation process.

So we have a choice between ephemeral organic matter from trees and digitized code that require translation. Electro-magnetic pulse seems a likely weapon in any futuristic war, and that basically fries every semiconductor in its vicinity. Besides the loss of life from any catastrophic attack, the the amount of permanent data loss is likely to be massive. (For more info, see an article about electro-magnetic pulse and its consequences. ). One sometimes is left wondering whether previous civilizations on earth also were obliterated by a similar effect.

Another argument made in the thread was that even if it were possible to digitize all information from this time period, how much of it is really worth saving? Think of all the trivial notes, emails, and letters you?ve written. Won?t it be wonderful when results from future search engines are clogged with recipes, weblogs and po()n. Oh, we can only dream of future retrieval methods!