Following up on the previous post, I am wondering how long digital content should be stored online.
First, I think it would make sense if a lot of the trivial content on the web was automatically deleted over time. Things like Twitter and Facebook posts, is there any reason this information should be kept for all eternity? These things strike me as very transitory, and they should be treated as such. The only reason companies keep this data around is probably to monetize the content.
Second, I am wondering how to apply this concept to the blog. One method would be to put an expiration date on blog posts – say, after a post is a year old, it should be deleted.
But I’m not sure about this method because that’s not the way the human memory works. Important memories are maintained while trivial information fades, and time is only one factor in this. For example, a person may vividly remember an event from a year ago, but not remember much about driving to work the other week.
So, is there any way to somehow keep the good (valuable) blog posts, and then let the rest decay (expire)? What I’m not sure of is who makes the judgment of a post being valuable.
For example, the blog author could go through posts and weed out lesser posts according to his or her judgment. This would be an occasional, spring-cleaning type of effort.
Alternatively, a blog author could keep the more popular posts as measured by hits (one measure of value to the audience) and then delete the less popular posts.
I’m really not sure about any of this, so I will open it up to any comments that others may have.
I like the idea too, I’d imagine it would need to be based on a combination of time, popularity (perhaps hits), and ‘worth’ or ‘usefulness’ (perhaps based on a ratio between length of time people spend on the page and length of the post in number of words?).
The main problem with this is the vanity of the content creator – who would want the work they have created to fall into a black hole, lost forever, because a computer algorithm deemed their creation valueless?
There is also the risk that the creation could have been altered/extended/improved by a person who would have read the work shortly after it got binned.
It is a hard one to call, and as space is so cheap as to be free – why would anyone ever delete anything they have created?
A solution is needed to this problem – but deletion may not be that solution.
It’s sort of an intellectual puzzle. I’ve been thinking about it for a couple days now, but I haven’t come up with anything more.
Why not save everything yourself, and then come back in a couple of years and run it by your readers again (if they still exist). Or better, revisit after 5 years and critique your previous thoughts, putting the originals and the critiques out together. Do it and 10 and 20 years as well!