Jeffrey Zeldman Quotes

With our blogs and tweets, digital cameras, and unlimited-gigabyte e-mail archives, participation in the online culture now means creating a trail of always present, ever searchable, unforgetting external memories that only grows as one ages.

TheIinternet is a timeless void - you put something in there, and it's there forever and loses a lot of context.

So much information lacks a good way to store it, especially when it's all digital; sometimes it requires old technology to go back and retrieve it.

It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does.

Wikipedians believe (and I do, too) that bits, being abstract, will outlast paper.

I no longer buy papers or tabloids or magazines or read blogs. I used to.

So we should preserve it. I don't think that digital storage is necessarily a good thing, but I definitely think that digital manipulation is interesting.

At the end of April I archived 'Curses' and Inform, and announced them on the newsgroups.

Frankly, with HBO and Showtime and cable shows, the DVD box sets and all, you can have a product that doesn't make you feel like as soon as it's projected, it's thrown away. It's really a piece of art.

While the creative works from the 16th century can still be accessed and used by others, the data in some software programs from the 1990s is already inaccessible.

Most of us still haven't grasped the fact that everything we commit to the digital space - not just our public blogs and broadcast tweets, but every private text message, email, and voicemail is likely to be stored and accessible. Forever.

I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.

People set newspapers on fire; they use them for wrapping fish. The Internet does not have that property. What I don't think we've gotten is that you can make things last longer than in print.

I read the 'New York Times,' 'USA Today,' the 'Union-Tribune,' then go online to Drudge, CNN, Fox News, blogs.

Someone asked me the other day what it feels like to see all my 'old stuff' reappearing, at long last, in digital. And I had to smile because to me it doesn't feel like 'old stuff.'

Digital media are biased toward replication and storage. Our digital photos practically upload and post themselves on Facebook, and our most deleted e-mails tend to resurface when we least expect it. Yes, everything you do in the digital realm may as well be broadcast on prime-time television and chiseled on the side of the Parthenon.

Now, not every blog post or 'Top 10 Ways to Make Money on the Internet' piece deserves to live forever. But there's gold among the dross, and there are web publications that we would do well to preserve for historical purposes.

Far from being dead, physical media has years of life left and must be preserved because there is no better alternative.

In a way, publishing in 2005 was similar to publishing in 1950. Nobody kept blogs; that was still optional. I didn't even have a website then.

The printed word is no longer as in demand as when I was of the age of pupils or even at the age of the teachers teaching them.

Gone are the days when your indiscretions at university were recorded in a roneoed college newsletter of which there is only one copy left tucked in a filing cabinet at the back of a library. Today that same college newsletter is online, accessible by the whole world now and forever.

But we will lose the millions of records being created daily in a dizzying array of electronic forms unless we find a way to preserve and keep them accessible indefinitely.

Online publication is fine with me, in part because I hope to collect those stories later.

I've got all my old laptops going back to my first, which was so fancy at the time, in '93 or '94, but now it's just like a doorstop. One day I said, 'I'll go in and get all my old documents in there.' The cords and the wires are all gone, the discettes you need are gone. Meanwhile the little electrons are starting to wither away.

It's amazing what's buried in old, poorly digitized PDFs hosted on some random professor's website.