[Web4lib] The end of MySpace, SecondLife, and Twitter

[Frank Wales]

sarah boyd wrote:
> Microsoft and the British Library teamed in May to create an archive of 
> British emails--called Email Britain.  The purpose is to save for
> posterity a "snapshot of British life" in emails "for generations to come."

[...]

> link to email Britain:   http://www.newhotmail.co.uk/emailbritain/

Thanks for that link.

I find it very curious, if their objective was to create a snapshot of
British life, that they specifically excluded so many things:

  + anything not currently in your 'inbox' or 'sent items' folder
  + anything bigger than 2MB
  + anything commercially sensitive
  + anything personally identifying
  + anything not in one of their rather arbitrary categories
  + anything that people didn't explicitly take the time to send in
  + anything that people couldn't get permission to contribute
  + anything deemed defamatory by someone
  + anything deemed unsuitable by someone

How much of your e-mail would that list have precluded,
even if you had known about it and been inclined to contribute?

Surely, to do something like this properly, it would have to be
a wholesale snapshot of, say, *all* email sent and received during
a particular month, for example.  With suitable terms and privacy
constraints, would that not be far more valuable to posterity than
some self-selected, highly-filtered, pre-edited collection of messages?

I know, from reading old magazines, that much of the most interesting
stuff is in the adverts, the personal ads and in the casual assumptions
about social conduct and habits that were no big deal at the time, but
that leap off the page today.

I don't see how the 'Email Britain' archive could possibly have captured
the kinds of things that might have similar value to future readers,
given what those running the project deemed to be worthwhile input.
-- 
Frank Wales [frank at limov.com]