Subtitled "On building Flipboard for iPhone and Finding Edges for Our Digital Narratives", this is a great essay on the process of building things digitally, documenting it, and what's left behind of art.

"ThinkUp captures your posts, replies, retweets, friends, followers, and links on social networks like Twitter and Facebook." Like TweetNest, but more social? Also: built on PHP/MySQL, like TweetNest, unlike Diaspora.

"How much will it cost?" "Well, it's a gift; we didn't pay for it. But it will be the cost of storing what is, right now, around 5 terabytes, and the staff effort of maybe one full-time person over the years."

Oh, I do like that grid of pictures for the year's news. I could do without the Flash animations before you get to it (and indeed I did when they loaded in a background tab), but there's something to that idea...

"Delicious may or may not have a future as a service, but regardless we can still 'save it' by extracting and preserving its collective memories." A call to export the public delicious data corpus to the Library of Congress, or similar.

"They begin to see another world, a world where the Web is social and interconnected, where we all benefit from the trails of data created by one another's everyday use of the Web. That's just the beginning."

I should probably install this and have a look at it. It'd be interesting to see if I can transform my own JSON backups to it, for example.

An interesting discussion on Twitter and transience. It still surprises me that people think that posts should vanish, just because they seem to.

"I’d gained some perspective on how narrow the real-time channels were. Their steely focus on The Now neglected all sorts of other facets of human existence, communication, happiness." Matthew Ogle's call-to-arms for better access to your own, older data on web sites.

"There's an unsurprising tension between corporations and perpetuity, so [in an alternate future where I didn't lose my job and Yahoo! created a new priority for itself as a corporation] we've decided to create The Flickr Foundation*, a DotORG to make new methods of protection, partnership and proliferation to conserve the world's digital commons."

Lots of projects to do with digital arhiving. For example, the Digital Slide Viewer: "The small white slides correspond to sets of photos on Flickr. When the slides are inserted in the device the colour of the labels on each slide is analyzed, and a corresponding set of images appear on the small screen embedded in the viewer."

A TC article (sorry) about an app I've been using for ages, which seems to have a second wind with its new version. This from the introductory paragraph is interesting: "It transforms [Foursquare] from a 'where you are' app, into a 'where you were' log. In a way, it’s sort of like a diary. I wish Twitter was better at this idea as well." Momento does that job, given sites generally don't.

"Relevant themes include but are not limited to family photographs and home movies; personal health and financial data; interface design for archives; scrap booking; social network data; institutional practices; genealogy; email, blogs and other correspondence; and funding models."

"It was better to keep everything clean and in the moment. If it’s relevant now, it belongs on Facebook, but the old stuff is no longer relevant so it doesn’t belong on Facebook." Interesting, and arguably something that the design of the service itself encourages: if old stuff is inaccessible, why not explicitly delete it? (Personally I want date-accessible archives. Perhaps that's a sign I'm old and weird.)

"Eighteen months ago I wrote about redesigning my site’s front page and mentioned in passing that I’d also created a page for every day which aggregated many things. I’ve now taken this a step further and added a map for every day which aggregates various pieces of location-based information about me." I've been thinking about doing this, but Phil actually has. Interesting musings about privacy in there, too.

I need to visit this to read a copy of "Administrative county of London development plan, first review 1960 : County planning report". Either that, or a visit to Hackney Central...

"if first impressions are anything to go by, it's so much better than whats come before. The UI is unbelievable. And the API's mean anyone can build on top of it." Dug out of #2lmc logs (which don't seem to record what I thought of the old Flash live-sharing site.)

On a proposed (infinite?) TV archive via a cable provider. "The Supreme Court should rule that copyright holders (the studios, in this case) retain the right to profit from the distribution of their work for a given period of time."

This looks nice. Of course, what would a video service be without geoblocking? This doesn't disappoint, showing big red "not outside the US" screens. Just as annoying, there's no upfront warning of it either in this post or on the archive itself.

Oh my. I might die if I visited.

"‘the BFI archive is a national treasure. It is arguably the finest film and television archive anywhere in the world" "Since 2003, the UKFC’s grant has been frozen, as has the proportion passed on to the BFI." Interesting (and saddening).