The sudden and unexpected demise of Marc Orchant has left a great void in the blogosphere but it has also raised a very important question in our minds. Yesterday, I twittered about it. Today, Dave Winer has raised a much more general question about the total web presence of a deceased person. Robert Scoble has responded to Dave with a post in which he suggests that huge corporations like Microsoft, Google or Amazon should come up with a hosting solution so that we can save our web presence for 100 years after our death. I don’t see a business solution for this. These archives hosted in the servers of big corporations dies along with the companies. Even for a well established company like Microsoft or Google or Amazon, 100 years is like an eon. The chances of survival for these companies are less compared to even our own chances of living for 100 years. Under such a scenario, any reliance on such large companies will only offer a little more shelf life for our web presence than what we can offer ourselves during our lifetime. We need to look in a totally different direction. We need to have a non profit solution like Internet Archive. These non-profit entities, supported by altruism, have a better chances of surviving than a company in a competitive playing field where profit making is the only motive (and the only option for survival). We should either talk to Internet Archive folks and ask them to come out with a solution for this or develop a solution along the lines of Internet Archive itself. It is good that Dave Winer has kickstarted this discussion in the blogosphere. It is time we all think about it. If this discussion leads to something fruitful, it will be the great tribute to Marc Orchant.
Dec 11
