If you wanted, blogs could be thought of as flowers ... each tended by a particular gardener ... each doomed when that gardener is gone.
Feeling my pain at this loss, my lover suggested in a moment of lucidity during an attack of faux hysteria that a "program could be written". Maybe ... maybe it could. In some ways Google and other automatic news extractors already do this ... but none come close to duplicating the perverseness that human intelligence brings to blogging ... what algorithm from what lab in Stanford would dare string together Rich Thompson, HomeStar Runner and fuel cell powered submarines ... these were all deliberate and conscious choices ... and these choices mean something.
Unless you make provisions to continue to pay for server space I expect your efforts will be gone shortly after you are. Even if you made the proper technical arrangements, the lack of activity in your blog would result in a dated archive of little interest to search robots, never mind humans. You could, of course turn your blog over to another in your will ... well, you could ... but humans, being what they are (see note characterizing them as perverse above), it would soon not be your blog at all.
I’m thinking there is an opportunity here ... a "program could be written" .... and it could start with existing news extractors. The basic engine would be tweaked and conditioned by your blogging history, and perhaps a personality test as well as other factors that clever people who know this sort of thing decide would help ... and it would then continue posting items as you might select and write them ... periodically there would be something about soft abstract images and a poet in my blog. This initiative, which might be called BIP, or Blog In Peace, could be set up quite affordably to go on forever as we can expect the cost of memory and computing power will approach zero in the relatively near future . We do expect that, don’t we?
That was easy ... but it’s just the short term solution ... how do we handle this for Deep Time?
