got my blog on a keychain

What a strange, holiday-hangover workday. I'm in late and working late due to yet another school meeting, so I'm suddenly wondering what I will do when everyone else goes home. I've been reading over blog entries and archiving them lately, looking at how our writing and our topics have progressed, and cursing Haloscan for dumping comments so rapidly. I'm also really questioning what return we get from lurking online--what does this internet life replace? Is it functioning like a weekly magazine? Is it displacing casual phone conversations? What's the advantage to being online? Is there anyone harvesting this glut of collective opinion? I did hear the MSM mentioning how bloggers were drumming up the story of slow relief on Katrina and how the gov't turned away aid. But if everyone has a blog, I can't continue to see the "blogging community" as counterculture, or a community at all. What's the advantage of having a topic-specific blog (a knitting blog or a political blog or a covert work blog) as opposed to just letting one's mind wander? And is there really a place for navel-gazing entries like these anymore?

Then we turn to the ways in which information is kept: if we really want to archive our thoughts or information, what is safe? If LJ goes down tomorrow, I would lose a lot of blather, but my images are elsewhere. Can we trust CD-ROMs, flash drives, or paper? Are these mumblings really going to be useful to anyone in twenty-five years? We may get so glutted, so transparent, that no one will care about reading our history. Or possibly it's just a question of which formats will survive; my adult journal will be gone, but the third-grade pink princess diary will be safe. Good heavens.