In reading Bruce Schneier’s post When the Internet Is My Hard Drive, Should I Trust Third Parties? I was struck with the thought that things are necessarily as bad as he makes them out to be. Using sites like ma.gnolia, diigo and even Google Notebook it is possible to save not only a link but also the actual content of the link. So if the original source goes away, you still have the content.
Of course, you are putting your trust in the fact that ma.gnolia itself is not going to go away and take all of your archived content with it. But if you look beyond web-based tools to something like Soho Notes, you can clip and save (and backup) web content to your local drive all you want and reduce your chances of being a victim of link-rot. Having a synchronization mechanism between online and local (or mobile for that matter) data would improve the survivability of the data.
I would still like to see this problem ‘solved’ by implementing what I call Ubiquitous Data.
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archiving, diigo, google, googlenotebook, linkrot, magnolia, ubiquitousdata