Yahoo Time Capsule

http://timecapsule.yahoo.com/capsule.php

A friend on IM passed along a cool link this morning. Yahoo is running a time capsule of user submitted items. Submissions are open till the 8th of November so there’s still time to get something in yourself … just use the submit link from the page above to go through the process. On Nov 8th, it all gets sealed up and handed over to the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

Its a cool idea … I submitted the photo and a condensed text from this post over at Global Paradigm. I do have some technical questions about the true longevity of digital time capsules. Having spent a couple of decades working with a variety of data storage systems, the one common element is that new storage schemes are coming out all the time. Most of my professional life in the 90’s was spent working with seismic data in a variety of formats. From that experience, the one thing that was clear about data storage is that regardless of the value at time of recording, as the recording and the media get older, both the value, and the ability to retrieve the data degrade significantly. No doubt the Smithsonian archive group have plans to upgrade media as need be, but its worth noting that even with live, web-based data, the vintage affects our ability to interpret and play data … old versions of media files may no longer be supported, and old standards in web design may no longer be universally supported. Special consideration will always be needed to ensure that all data in the capsule remais accessible over time.

But there’s an even larger issue, though I guess its the same issue, really. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the 1939 and 1965 time capsules at US World Fairs, and one of the key points from both of those capsules is that they are physical things that contain physical items. Time capsules are, in part, around to inform future versions of our culture of a familiar, forgotten past, but they are also intended to serve as a Rosetta Stone of sorts, explaining, or displaying our culture to people who may know nothing of who or what we were. Words on paper, or actual things, will always have a longer life-span than digital recordings … I think this is a cool idea, but I do wonder about the life-span of the project.