"Did I really say that?"

Weblog archives are not a dustbin; the web, this easy, freeform noosphere is for the ages.

One of the delightful (or troubling) aspects of the web and of blogs in particular is permanence. The web provides novel & easy access to the past. It can "compress" our sense of time. A post or remark made 6 weeks or maybe even 6 years earlier can be read by a new reader as if it was written yesterday. The past re-emerges; time loops back on itself; there is no forgetting. One must learn to say "but I said that back then." To your new reader, it's fresh. --- things one has written a year before might be commented upon tomorrow and as if it was the most natural thing in the world to pick up a conversation. Imagine you are in a car on a long drive and out of the blue your companion comments without preface on some trivial thing you said 600 miles further back.

Weblogs are not like magazines, newspapers etc. Who except scholars ever goes back and reads one from 1955 or even January 2003?

Brian Mickelthwait alerted me to this phenomenon. He found my comment on an old post of his and then made a passing comment on the past reaching into the present. He observed that "[o]ne of the oddities of Samizdata is that comments come in on postings long forgotten. Usually they can be allowed to settle back into the archives..."

A case in point for systematic miners: For the built environment try the 2blowhards Artchitecture/Art Archive. A lot of their old postings/discussions are too interesting to be allowed to die and (unfortunately in the case of modern architecture) seem to have continuing relevance. For example, try Salingaros on Deconstruction.

Btw, the search function for a blog is an essential if you want to keep your blog live.