For the record

Blogging has definitely made me more conscious of my year – I can go back through my archives and see what I was thinking about on this day last year, for instance (I was writing about a game, surprise, surprise – and about M’s first unicycle!). I also maintain a paper diary, but for some reason I am less conscientious about the diary and sometimes forget to write in it for for days at a time. I do wonder though – will this blog still be findable/readable in 10, 20, 100 years’ time? Will my diary? (maybe it’s time to investigate inks with archival properties.)

I don’t know if blogs and diaries can ever record everything there is to know about a person, although anyone who has access to both my blog and my diary may have a slightly more complete picture of the sorts of things that interest me. No doubt they would have a field day analysing why I leave out certain things, or why I only write about certain other things…

At this time of year all the This-is-the-Year-that-was articles and posts start to appear. I enjoy reading them to see if I can remember all the events referred to. It usually amazes me how much I will have forgotten about over the intervening months.
“Who won this year’s Melbourne Cup?” (hmmm… do I even care?)
“The miners. Where were they trapped again? I can’t remember their names, either…” (Is this terrible of me??)
“There was an earthquake in Indonesia this year, wasn’t there?” (Yes – in Yogyakarta in May – I actually wrote this down in my diary!)

What sort of a picture would a researcher of the blogosphere have of the year 2006?

I wonder about all the stuff that goes unreported and unremarked…