Those who seek to preserve online content for the future may find inspiration in internet smut. Snip from CNET article:
"I guarantee that a wealth of pornography from the late 20th century will survive in digital distributed form (because) it's a social model that's working extremely well," said Kurt Bollacker, digital research manager at the Long Now Foundation, a nonprofit fostering several digital-works preservation projects. Bollacker spoke Thursday at a symposium called "New Media and Social Memory" at the University of California at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
He held up the adult industry–always the digital pioneer–as one example of a self-selected community on the Web that swaps images and videos so regularly and widely that that activity will ultimately help preserve an archive over years. Similarly, he pointed to successful niche archives like the Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator, or MAME, a collective of programmers who preserved video games from the 1980s with CPU and hardware emulators.
"Anyone interested in preserving digital art should evaluate ongoing distributed data efforts," said Bollacker, who has a background in artificial intelligence and previously worked with the Internet Archive, a Web preservation project.
Link.
BoingBoing reader Patrick Tufts went to the event and says, "This was a good talk – mostly
not about porn, but when you bring up a topic like this in the afternoon of an all-day seminar, it's going to get someone's attention."
