Perpetual hosting – make your blog live for ever

Here’s a good idea from Dave Winer (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6748103.stm): perpetual hosting.

Suppose you write a diary-style blog and you want to give your great-great-great grandchildren the chance to read about the life of their distance forebears. How are you going to do that? Right now, if you get run over by a bus tomorrow, when your hosting company mails you to tell you you need to renew your hosting deal or your domain name nobody’s going to pay up and your blog will disappear from the blogosphere. It’ll probably remain in some form within the Internet Archive, but no one will find it there and it won’t look or work like it was supposed to.

What you need is for someone (Google is the obvious candidate) to offer to capture your fully functional blog, or website of any kind, and keep it in its fully working state for ever, for a one-off payment.

Probably, for an additional regular payment, they’d snapshot your site on a regular basis. But, because you’ve made the initial lump sum payment, when you pop your clogs and stop paying for the snapshotting, the blog will just stay up there as you left it. I like to think of it as internet cryogenics.

For a company with vast storage capacity and the chutzpah to think they might be in operation for ever, it’s a sure-fire money making venture if ever there was one. So come on Google, what’re you waiting for?