I recently wrote about Net Debris – the little unfinished droppings and leavings we scatter across the internet. Recently, I got an e-mail from a young man named Colin McAvoy, reminding me of a piece I wrote years ago:
Dear Ike:
Thank you for contributing this article to TV Jobs. I’m not a member, but I do have the site bookmarked so I can come back and read the advice of broadcast veterans such as yourself. I myself am trying to break into the industry and will take all the good advice I can get. I hope you can contribute more articles to TV Jobs for youngsters like me to read and to better prepare ourselves for what awaits us out there…if we happen to break in, of course. Thanks again. It was a fun read.
I used to get several comments a week from college students, and over time that waned. (Over time, my e-mail address has changed, and somehow has now been fixed in the link at the header of the article.) I hadn’t thought about that article in months, but out nowhere I get a polite reply.
I’d like to think there are many others out there finding benefit in things I’ve written and subsequently forgotten about. I’d rather not think about the impressions they are making about my character, based on the things I’ve written and tried to forget about.
The hidden danger here is we all have so little control over our online oeuvre. Most of us didn’t start on webspace we own – it’s usually someone else’s hosted forum that we couldn’t delete if we tried. Never mind Google’s cache or the Internet Archive.
Maybe I need to take Occam’s RazR “off the grid.” Let it hide from the robots, and be a secret destination for the initiated. What kind of event would it take to make web-publishers so paranoid that they kicked the crawlers away, and refused to add to their Net Debris? Has anyone even thought of that? What would happen to Google’s value if enough people with real content started hiding?
It’ll never happen. That’s what they always say before it does.
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, internet, blogging, communications, email, Google, websearch[/tags]
I wrote many articles for a tech mag in San Jose and for years I received feedback. A few years ago the mag was bought by another publisher and they deleted the archives. Slowly my tracks are being paved over, which in retrospect might be a good thing.
It depends if you’re hoping to make money from your words. If so, then sure, maybe keeping your body of work off-digital might make sense. I shoot for the long ball myself. I try giving everything away, on the hope that I can make up the value in another form or format.
For instance, for everyone who publishes their book online, even as a free download, the book sales still seem to outnumber the unique downloads. Bigger names, this is, but I think it would hold true for most of us, give or take good placement in a book store.
Interesting post, Ike.