Craigs Blog

Odd subject this one. Some stuff lately got me thinking what would I leave behind for future generations? I’m sticking some links to blogs on the subject of digital legacy up at http://del.icio.us/cgbeattie/legacy.

So here’s the big question – if my neice and nephew at the age of 31 wanted to find out what i was thinking and doing at 31 – would they be able to find out? There’s alot out there…

• I have pictures from this month on my machine
• google calendar has lots of details of stuff i’m up too
• there’s this blog – i took up yoga for instance…
• there’s my twitter account
• there’s my facebook account which handily integrates with twitter
• there’s my feedburner feed
• there’s all my sites linked to from my claimid page

so the interesting question is – will all this be around in 29 years? will it be around in 89 years? 389 years? Will my grandkids be able to go to a search engine (google?) and say what was craig gerard beattie doing in 2007?= In fact my homepage does pop up in the list there – maybe there’s hope as long as my grandkids know i wasn’t a famous footballer ;) Intriguingly what was craig beattie doing in 2005?= is lots more successful ;o)

Intriguingly there’s alot of stuff now on facebook about things i and my friends are doing – but its a closed network. Sure later I’ll add my neice, nephew, friends and family to my profile but when I pass I won’t be able to add friends – family members wouldn’t be able to see and peruse my profile there after, it would simply pass into disuse – assuming facebook is around after that… I could pass the account to an offspring or younger family member to administer but would this mean my childrens childrens children would have 3 generations of identities to protect – a family librarian if you will?? Even then – could you find the data you wanted?

feedburner and twitter offer some hope in that the rss feeds are in my google reader and are archived all over the place – there’s some hope that google will have visibility – hope that it’s still around and thus hope that my pages are cached and findable by future generations. Hope but not certainty oddly enough.

And what of craigbeattie.com? I own it now – can I expect an offspring to maintain it in my passing. I actually want these random thoughts kept – I’d like to think in a few hundred years my descendents knew I was thinking of them, and that they could understand some of what I am thinking about, who I was – what I chose to record. so what is my legacy?

Funnily I find now that some home pages I wrote during university on geocities no longer exist, history gone – words, thoughts – stuff I’m fairly sure I now have no record of.

How then, is one supposed to ensure ones legacy?

It seems I’m not the only one wondering about this. This blog entry on is my digital legacy too secure also wonders about this, and this one on a shoebox legacy posits that one should print stuff out and store it in a box.

Perhaps both have the right answer…

still the former article did point me to the web archive and low and behold – my ancient geocities web site is still there – seems like it was deleted around 2004(?) but hey – it’s still there kids! (whether it works is a whole ‘nother matter ;) )

perhaps then, there is hope for my legacy yet…

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