A few weeks ago I had a few drinks with my mate and (surprise, surprise) we got chatting about blogging. Being the creative type (him, not me) the discussion got a little deep. He thinks online communication, along with the brilliance of Google indexing, lets our thoughts, words and feelings that we add to the web via blogs, MySpace, or any other platform will be available forever and for all to see.
Think about that: Every post you’ve ever blogged and every comment you’ve ever left on other blogs will be available as long as the internet exists. Fifty years from now your grandchildren or great grandchildren even, can, with a few clicks, discover a considerable amount about you. How do you feel about that?
My mate has chosen not to be a part of it all. He doesn’t blog, he doesn’t comment on other blogs (although he reads them), and he works at keeping as much of his personal details offline as possible. I understand his point and respect his decision. However, I feel pretty comfortable with the fact that the future Davies generation can know a little bit about me and what my interests were at a certain stage of my life if they choose to. In fact I kinda like the idea. Knowing your family background and where you came from is important to a lot of people. If the internet enables this then so be it. Hi kids! 
From a business and PR point of view, this is something organisations should take into consideration. How do they, as a company, want their actions of today to be perceived in 50 years time? No doubt consumer and public attitude will have changed considerably by then and every action they make will be available via a search engine or, if not, a cache. Not to mention the available range of positive or negative opinions voiced about the organisation.
If corporate blogs stay true to the fundamentals of blogging etiquette, then the future’s bright for their online legacy. Today’s transparency and openness will bode them well for the future.
Cross posted to The Interactive.
Stephen is a communications consultant based out of the UK. You can connect with him on Twitter or check out his LinkedIn profile. | Email Stephen
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Jack
There’s a big assumption being made here: That any current archiving system (Archive.org? Don’t think so.) would actually preserve pages being constructed today. That’s seems unlikely.
This may change, but today, if you’d pull your site down, it’d vanish eventually.
run dogg
You can always go to the “Way Back Machine” on Alexa.com – they keep track of the sites, building a history of web time
Adam
Good point. I don’t see why it couldn’t happen. That’s if they are still using the internet in the future. We have all experienced in our short lifetimes how fast technology has been evolving, you never know what someone is cooking up in their garage!
Richard Millington
I think a major issue here is not that every cyber tap or click is stored indefinitely, it’s how people use the information that is stored.
When you’re young and/or hotheaded you’re going to say things that are young and dumb. When people Google (or whatever flying-car style search engine machine they use in the future) search you, they will find these comments. They will find the criticisms that others have made of you.
Using recruiters as an example. Recruiters must be able to seperate the relevant personal information from the irrelevant information. They must be able to better determine what’s going to make a top employee. This means placing all the information they find into context. How old was the potential employee when they did/said that for example? Why was that site those comments against him/her?
Social networking websites add another fascinating twist to the story. From these websites you can, quite comprehensively, investigate someone’s social group, romantic history, hidden past. All the things that everyone would have outright refused to put on a CV are now online for anyone to see.
This changes the romantic landscape considerably. The slow getting-to-know-you stage is over. You can find out a fair chunk of information about any potential partner online. Previous partners, favourite films, foods, drinks, thoughts of the day, (thoughts about you?). Though this might allow for a handy bit of “relationship segmentation”.
However it does mean we have the opportunity to carefully craft our online identities. Piece together impressive strands of history, comments, thought leadership etc that will impress recruiters.
It’s going to be fascinating, perhaps worrying, to discover how interested parties are going to use the information about us.
sam wilcox
Is anyone else thinking Friends here? Ross and Janine – “You can download your thoughts onto a computer and live forever as a machine”…Ok maybe I’m the only obsessive(!)
Seriously I’m all for the idea, but I can see the potential downfalls if something nasty was to get out there. Perhaps in the future we will see an ‘online discrimination’ law where companies will be banned from judging potential employees by things found on certain websites?
Kristina R.
The information uploaded about an organisation or individual can of course stay in the internet forever. However, so do things, which appear in traditional media that are stored in archives or copied onto electronic storage media.
What concerns me a little bit is that information that is uploaded on the internet can easily be manipulated and gerrymandered. That leads me to the thought that, how wonderful the idea of looking at the stuff posted generations ago might be, these archives don’t seem particularly reliable to me.