Tuesday, November 4, 2008

The world is just a great big, er, archive



















Now I don't want to sound like a designer from IKEA, but storing things in an effective manner is surely important. Google may tell us that the world is now about searching rather than sorting, but things have to sit somewhere.

Where they end up sitting can tell us something notable about who's doing the storing.

For instance, I wasn't going to write today's blog entry about this ostensibly rather tawdry subject, but I was struck when looking on Google Images for a piece of advertising by BP that at least half of the results showed images that came from people's blogs. See today's picture for a little bit of evidence.

My hypothesis is that the individuals who are now documenting the goings on around the world - verbally and visually - are collectively providing us with one of the richest archives. And doing so possibly better than any one single professional archivist.

Our blogging and search tools have turned us into a giant library. And it just might be a rather useful one.

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