Short-term time capsules
The other day, for reasons whose names I do not wish to recall, I was looking in Snarkmarket’s archives from 2007. There were chains I’d remembered, great ideas I’d forgotten, funny anachronisms, and prescient observations.
Generally, though, I was struck by how much shorter the posts were. I’m sure this is equally because in 2007, my many paragraphs were safely in the comments and because Twitter now carries most of the content that went into one-to-three-sentence “hey, look at this!” links. (Plus, migrating the archives to WordPress truncated some of the longer posts that used to have “jumps” built-in.)
Five selected links, just from July 2007:
- Probably the first instance of Robin’s combinatorial textbot going off: “Errol Morris, New York Times, Blog.”
- Matt goes old school.
- OMG, Radio Lab.
- I definitely think we should bring back the phrase “visual public sphere.”
- In the comments, I unload on Robin about his Wes Anderson preferences. In Robin’s defense, The Fantastic Mr Fox was waaaaayy better than The Darjeeling Limited, as he predicted.
Maybe I’ll try to do this once a month.
This is awesome. It’s a sort of reflexive paleoblogging — I mean, not exactly, b/c this stuff was all digital already — but you’re doing the same basic thing, I think: bringing it to the surface, dusting it off, showing it under new light. Awesome.
Born-digital paleoblogging is the next new thing. Exhibit A: The archives of Feed.