Who's Storing Your Words?
Posted on: Friday, 9 May 2008, 03:00 CDT
By Goldsborough, Reid
One of the oldest online maxims is "You own your own words." If only it were that simple. This maxim comes from the pre-lnternet explosion days when computer bulletin board systems were how most people communicated online. It was coined by Stewart Brand, founder of the popular service The WELL, to try and place responsibility for what was posted on the individual who did the posting to his site rather than on himself. But it has also been interpreted to mean that no one but you should copy and reuse your words online unless they have your permission to do so, even though Brand himself opposed this copyright interpretation of what he wrote in his early WELL members' agreement. Fortunately, others have also agreed with this broader interpretation of what others can do with your words. But not everyone.
When you launch a web site or blog or participate in Internet discussions, you may think your words, whether they are hasty or wise, will gradually fade away over time. But Internet archive systems exist that in all likelihood are preserving those words long term. The best-known web archive service is the Wayback Machine, www.archive.org/web/web.php, part of a larger effort called the Internet Archive, www.archive.org, a nonprofit organization that preserves web sites by regularly saving images of the site. The organization's Wayback Machine provides links to older versions of a web page, and so even if you have had second thoughts about that site or blog and have taken it down, there is a chance the pages can be retrieved.
This free service has been taking snapshots of the Web at various points in time since 1996, with an astonishing 85 billion pages currently archived. Archiving is all about redundancy, and the content of the Wayback Machine is mirrored, appropriately enough, at the New Library of Alexandria in Egypt (http:// archive.bibalex.org). The original Library of Alexandria, founded by the Greek rulers of Egypt around 300 BC, was designed to be the repository of all the world's knowledge.
If you do not want your words preserved for posterity, the Wayback Machine lets you opt out. The service offers detailed directions on how to remove previous versions of your site from its archive and prevent it from making the archives in the future (www.archive.org/about/exclude.php).
Another well-known archive service is Google Groups (http:// groups.google.com), previously called Deja News and before that DejaViews. Google Groups is a web interface to Usenet, the worldwide system of hundreds of thousands of online discussion groups. People can participate in these discussions through the Web, through their e-mail program, or through a specialized Usenet program.
The Google Groups web site is most useful in letting you search for and join specific discussion groups as well as search for current and old posts of yours and others about specific subject matter, with archives of posts going back to 1981. Google Groups provides the means to remove your previous posts from its archive and to prevent it from archiving future posts, but as with the Wayback Machine, you have to take matters into your own hands.
To remove your posts from the Google Groups archive, you have to create a free account with Google Groups, and it's best to do so using the same email address you used for the posts you want deleted. You can have Google Groups delete posts you made with an old e-mail address you no longer have, but this is more cumbersome. For details, read "How Do I Remove My Own Posts?"
Google Groups also lets you block them from archiving your posts in the first place. You can retrieve those instructions at http:// groups.google.corn/support/bin/ answer.py?answer-4648 7.
Your words may also be archived at any web site discussion group and at any Yahoo Groups e-mail discussion groups you've participated in. Some web site discussion groups will let you remove your posts yourself. But you may need to, as with Yahoo Groups, ask the web master or group moderator to remove any given post for you.
There are numerous other web sites that crawl the Web, Usenet, Yahoo Groups, and similar places and create archives themselves. You can find some of them through a relevant Google search, typing in as keywords any distinctive phrases you remember from any posts you've made. Some of these sites, however, are pay services, and their archives won't be accessible to Google. So there is no way to ensure your words are completely within your control.
Perhaps the best strategy, if you do not want your words to come back and haunt you, is to remember your mother's words: Think before you speak. Another option is to use a pseudonym or "handle."
The flip side of Internet archive services is their usefulness in helping you find what might otherwise have been lost.
Reid Goldsborough: Author of Straight Talk About the Information Superhighway. reidgold@netaxs.com, http://members.home .net/ reidgold
Source: Teacher Librarian
User Comments (0)
RSS Feeds