👓 Friday, August 10, 2018 | Scripting News

Read Friday, August 10, 2018 by Dave Winer (Scripting News)

I got an email in the middle of the night asking if I had seen an announcement from Berkman Center at Harvard that they will stop hosting blogs.harvard.edu. It's not clear what will happen to the archives. Let's have a discussion about this. That was the first academic blog hosting system anywhere. It was where we planned and reported on our Berkman Thursday meetups, and BloggerCon. It's where the first podcasts were hosted. When we tried to figure out what makes a weblog a weblog, that's where the result was posted. There's a lot of history there. I can understand turning off the creation of new posts, making the old blogs read-only, but as a university it seems to me that Harvard should have a strong interest in maintaining the archive, in case anyone in the future wants to study the role we played in starting up these (as it turns out) important human activities.

This is some earthshaking news. Large research institutions like this should be maintaining archives of these types of things in a defacto manner. Will have to think about some implications for others in the DoOO and IndieWeb spaces.