When Karen Russell from UGA saw this article in the AJC this week she immediately thought of the post I wrote about the use of blogs in 'writing' history years from now. The AJC article talks about the problems we're currently having the accessing old digital content:

"We need to preserve digital information in such a way that it will be intelligible in 100 years," says Abby Smith, a consultant with the Library of Congress' digital preservation program. But she and others say that when it comes to preserving digital records, a solution has yet to be found....

...At the National Archives, staffers are already experiencing such problems. The government began storing key military records, such as flight details, on computers as early as the Vietnam War era, says Kenneth Thibodeau, director of its Electronic Records Archives program. Today, those records of every flight in Vietnam "are sitting in obsolete tapes in an obsolete format," says Thibodeau.

Will RSS/XML be a format that can be read 100 years from now? How about HTML? It's an interesting question. What makes blogs and the web so great is that the format can be parsed by a number of different devices at various levels. I'd like to think that much of what is being written and stored online today will be readable in a century, but perhaps like the early digital historians of 30 years ago we just assume that somebody will be able to interpret the data.