File over app — Steph Ango

Song blogging: Files That Last

I hereby declare that this song is my official anthem.

I want some files that last, data that will not stray.

Files just as fresh tomorrow as they were yesterday.

Just Solve the Problem Month 2012: Nitty Gritty « ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason goes into detail describing the File Format problem that he and others are going to tackle in the effort known as Just Solve The Problem.

Century-Scale Storage

This magnificent piece by Maxwell Neely-Cohen—with some tasteful art-direction—is right up my alley!

This piece looks at a single question. If you, right now, had the goal of digitally storing something for 100 years, how should you even begin to think about making that happen? How should the bits in your stewardship be stored with such a target in mind? How do our methods and platforms look when considered under the harsh unknowns of a century? There are plenty of worthy related subjects and discourses that this piece does not touch at all. This is not a piece about the sheer volume of data we are creating each day, and how we might store all of it. Nor is it a piece about the extremely tough curatorial process of deciding what is and isn’t worth preserving and storing. It is about longevity, about the potential methods of preserving what we make for future generations, about how we make bits endure. If you had to store something for 100 years, how would you do it? That’s it.

Permanence · Indie Microblogging

One of the reasons to own your content is to make it last. When you have control of the text you write or the photos you post, it’s up to you whether that content stays on the internet. When you post to someone else’s platform, you’ve given up that control. It’s not up to you whether the company that hosts your content will stay in business or change everything to break your content.

The Cuneiform Tablets of 2015 [PDF]

A 2015 paper by Long Tien Nguyen and Alan Kay with a proposal for digital preservation.

We discuss the problem of running today’s software decades,centuries, or even millennia into the future.