During the ArchivePress project at ULCC, we briefly considered the data and metadata generally made available with blogs and blog posts. As ArchivePress focused on the representations of blogs in newsfeeds, we examined the metadata that is generated in common, and exposed in the newsfeeds of three of the most common blog platforms, WordPress, Blogger and TypePad. Blogger and Typepad prefer the Atom newsfeed format; WordPress (particularly WordPress.com) prefers RSS (though it can be made to publish Atom feeds too). This analysis was done, about a year ago, things may have changed, but here is a summary of what we found.

For each Blog, the following core information is available in the feeds:

For each Post, we established that the following core information is available in the newsfeeds:

One interesting point we noted was that neither Blogger nor Typepad published a link to a Comments Feed for each post. This made our work on ArchivePress more difficult since it was predicated on being able to easily identify the Comments feed for each post, and harvest new Comments as they were published. Obviously for blogs generated other than by WordPress, this was not going to be so easy. (Our ace developer Emanuele found some workarounds, but that’s another story.)

I think this offers us an interesting overview of the core of standard, structured blog data and metadata, in three of the leading blog platforms. This is the data structure and metadata profile that is maintained in blog databases, in one of its native forms, and I’d expect it to be present in all blog platforms, since it arguably represents the essence of blogs. I hope this will be useful background when considering the core models for data and metadata handling that will be developed for BlogForever.

Is there a particular blog or blogger you would like to see included in the BlogForever survey? We invite you to use this form to nominate them, and we will try to ensure that the blog is reviewed or the blogger contacted to participate in our survey.

At an atomic level, a “blog” comprises “blog posts”, which are continually added to the blog corpus: that is the dynamic essence of a blog, and distinguishes it from old-fashioned, largely static Websites and hypertexts in which little content changed between major update iterations, which process was probably more akin to “publishing a new edition” in the world of non-digital publications.

The blog also displays, as part of its frame, other graphical and functional elements (sidebars, widgets, “blogrolls”, etc) which may themselves contain dynamically updated, constantly changing information. These can be added, removed, amended and rearranged at will by the blog author/editor. Blog posts that were “published” in the context of one set of framing elements, will persist through subsequent versions of that framework.

Similarly with design (layout, colours, mastheads, etc), though the persistence tends to be longer, the informal nature of blogs means that these may be easily changed by the blog editor/author, and are thus more volatile than a typical “corporate” website. Again, blog posts may persist, unchanged in themselves, through many iterations of the blog site design and layout.

A simple view of blog elements and their temporal relationship

This very simplified visualisations suggests where we might start conceptualising key elements of a blog. It indicates that they iterate over time, but in the cases of Design, Posts and Widgets (as we’ll call them for brevity), according to independent schedules. While Posts and Comments persist in the online view of a blog, designs and widget arrangements are overwritten.

With my earlier ArchivePress project we deliberately overlooked preservation of the blog’s framing elements, and (given the much smaller scope of that project) established an acceptable rationale for doing so. The challenge for BlogForever is to find a solution to  precisely these issues. Unless we were simply to adopt the snapshot approach of Heritrix-based web archiving initiatives (e.g. Wayback/archive.org, UK Web Archive), we need to ensure the BlogForever repository supports a degree of granularity that can capture, describe and preserve atomic blog objects in a way that reflects the particular interdependencies, in order to understand and preserve them authentically, and permit the many possible authentic and valid “time slice” views and analyses that users of the archive will need.

(I appreciate, by the way that these objects themselves are compound objects, so not strictly “atomic”: but the same is also true of atoms, as our CERN colleagues can attest!)

Calls in the literature have advocated that blogs, as potentially valuable additions to the human record, are worthy of stewardship and long-term preservation. It’s hard to argue with this, in the light of recent widely publicised use of blogging by President Obama, the Number Ten Downing Street blog, the blogging and tweeting activities of certain celebrities, and so on. But of course anyone can have a blog (and it sometimes seems that almost everyone does). Blogs are phenomenally useful, and have a wide variety of applications: individual or corporate announcements and publications; time-stamped records of activities; public or private figures writing as themselves or pseudonymously; public and private journal and discussion spaces for students and a wide range of communities. A blog may well be just for Christmas (or any kind of project) no less than a traditional diary or journal. It is in essence, after all, just a sequential log (“blog” is merely a geeky contraction of “web log”). Blogging is therefore not so fundamentally alien: Captain Cook kept a log (and so will Captain Kirk). Rather than make it sound very technical and complicated, let’s start by taking some comfort in what’s familiar.

Should all blogs be preserved? Which blogs should be preserved? The DPE Briefing Paper highlights (as all good preservation advice must) the issue of selection. How do we decide which blogs to preserve? To start with, the remit of any archival body (national, municipal, corporate, specialist, etc.) is itself self-selecting. It’s unlikely any archivist at NARA, TNA or any other archive would ever have to begin their deliberations with “all blogs”. Of matters of authenticity and attribution, the nature of the archive undertaking the preservation will, equally, dictate whether knowing the true identity is essential or not. Common sense should prevail. Clearly for records of official activities, such as the Downing Street and Obama blogs, reliable provenance and authenticity are critical. On the other hand, satirical blogs by “Gordon Brown” or “Vladimir Putin“  are clearly not records of official activities, but they still may merit preservation as publications and/or as interesting artefacts: as with many fictional or satirical diaries or letters, the true identity of the author may or may not be material (Beachcomber, Henry Root, Primary Colors).

Is preservation of content, regardless of context, sufficient? This is one of the most significant questions raised by the briefing paper. Has the Web changed our expectations of context? Once a descriptive catalogue or historical account seemed sufficient to establish context. Digital media now tempt us into thinking that, for any object, we should automatically gather (a copy of)  everything linked-to, and perhaps everything that links to, and so on. We can leave a computer to follow the endlessly forking paths, and create a virtual machine environment that will always render the gather materials faithfully – all without any manual intervention. Will that provide context, or make the preserved content understandable? Can we do without expert researchers and information professionals to scope, select and provide commentary where necessary?

The inability to capture and preserve the design and features of the blog contradicts defining attributes of a blog. In fact it’s not impossible to capture and preserve many if not all of the design features of a blog. The JISC-PoWR blog has been harvested by UKWAC with most of its features intact (experiments at ULCC have suggested that, with a little care, WordPress blogs are particularly well-suited to harvesting). But in general, let’s accept (as the Blogbackuponline people do) the overriding significance of the textual content over and above the bells and whistles of the web presentation. If there is one particularly interesting feature of blogs, that does set them apart from conventional web content, it is that they are generally intended for delivery and consumption in two distinct formats: by HTML web page, and by RSS/Atom XML newsfeed. The newsfeed version is bare-bones hypertext stripped of all the styling, bells and whistles of the web version, and will be read in many contexts, from online newsreaders and aggregators, like Netvibes or Bloglines, to desktop clients, such as Mozilla Thunderbird, as well as on mobile phones, and by automatic syndication to other sites.

Blogs, including posts and comments, may be intentionally edited or deleted. Looked at in isolation, editability is a significant property of blogs in everyday use. But, as Chris Rusbridge observed , “editability, while vital for some kinds of re-use, is not essential for conveying the information essence of the objects”. Any preserved object we have only in the state it was when taken into archival custody (though we may also capture and preserve records of how it changed). Preservation schedules for blogs will need to decide how important this really is: when is it and when is it not important to preserve an edit that no one ever saw? (A transactional approach – only capturing page impressions users request – is one way to address this without excessive redundancy.) However, if anything, this volatiliy of blog content is a more serious issue for those citing an active blog (who may find their quotations no longer match): a copy in an archive ought to be fixed, and reliably citable. If anything, this would suggest that creating stable archives of valuable blogs for the record is essential.

James Currall rightly warned us against making an undue fetish of digital media, at the expense of the information (and entertainment) which they convey; arguably as dangerous is the fetishisation of specific manifestations of digital media. How different, really, are blogs from other publications or applications built on the Web platform? Blogs are essentially web pages and don’t exist in a void. The “problem” of hypertext links to possibly unstable objects in remote locations is the bête-noire of all efforts to tame the Web. “Not in archive” is, and will ever be, a familiar message to regular users of archive.org. But we can perhaps take heart that many archives of correspondence tend to be one-sided too.

Sometimes thinking about these things in the abstract is no substitute for actually doing them for real. Perhaps the best advice for anyone tasked with preserving blogs is, first of all, to try keeping one yourself for a few days or weeks. Then it only takes a few minutes to try out BlogBackupOnline; or check how your favourite blog is faring in the Internet Archive , the European Web Archive, or the UK Web Archive; or even download HTTrack or Wget and try harvesting something yourself.

Then it’s time to get Twittering…

Do let us know if you still see problems.

Editor: According to the Technorati survey “Self expression and sharing expertise are the top reasons for blogging, followed by networking”. What do you think is your main purpose?

DA Blog: I like to think of myself as more of a professional than a corporate blog. I don’t blog for its own sake: I could post more. But everyone here has work to do, so it’s most expedient to use the blog to support those things, using the public blog as a record of our more public activities – hopefully ones that others will find interesting. You could think of me as a public branch of our collective, prosthetic memory, if that helps.

Ed.: Do you think you should include more personal opinions in your posts?

DAB: I’m not averse to spontaneous outbursts of powerful feeling, or constructive discussions, but I’ll leave it to other blogs to court controversy. My recent posts about the demise of the National Archives of Ireland, and about the implications of Web 2.0 for archives caused some of the biggest spikes in my readership. But my bread-and-butter is still rooted in what ULCC Digital Archives staff are up to. Timely reports about popular events in our field (OR08, IPRES) are always popular with fellow professionals, keen to read online reports about the events they’ve just attended (or, increasingly, are still sitting in).

Ed.: Are there things you’d like to blog about but don’t?

DAB: Of course. I have to be aware of the sensitivities of some of my customers, partners, employers. No one wants to end up being sacked for blogging. I work in an HE environment, and there are many fascinating things going on in teaching and research that don’t always have a preservation angle, so I tend not to include them: perhaps I should.

Ed.: Do you consider yourself a part of the active blogosphere?

DAB: I haven’t actively pursued trackbacks, SOE, or anything like that, but Technorati currently rates me with an authority of 15 – down from 19 a couple of months ago, but well within the top 10% of the 5 million blogs in the Technorati survey.

Ed.: According to State of the Blogosphere 2008, the majority of corporate and professional bloggers have seen a positive impact as a result of their blog and half are better known in their industry. What impact have you experienced – positive or negative?

DAB: One of the most valuable benefits of running DA Blog has been a tangible sense that I am participating in an online community in digital archives and preservation – a professional social network and community of practice. I’ve been especially pleased to receive informative and valued comments from experts at DCC, DPC, UKOLN and the JISC.

Ed.: Have you linked up with other blogs?

DAB: It’s been great to spot and follow trackbacks to other blogs. Not just high profile blogs in my field – Dave Mattison, Lorcan Dempsey, Chris Rusbridge, etc. – but other less prominent blogs I might never have come across otherwise, for example:

• personal-professional blogs (Alans notes and thoughts on digital preservation, Kiara King’s Web Watching For Archivists),
• experiments in aggregating archival news (arch.i.vi.us, archivesandidenties)
• archive/library blogs from beyond the UK:
  • from USA (Kate Theimer’s ArchivesNext, Jill Hurst-Wahl’s Digitization 101),
  • from Canada (Toronto ACA Student Chapter )
  • from Spain (Associació d’Arxivers de Catalunya)
  • from France (Marlène’s Corner and Figoblog, “a blog about the Internet, the Biblioteconomy, and fig jam”)
  • possibly even some Japanese trackbacks, but I couldn’t be sure
• blogs relating to our customers’ work, such as the William Morris Society blog.

Ed.: Have you picked up any good tips for other blogs and bloggers?

DAB: A professional blog like me just lets posts flow naturally from what people are really doing, and their desire to communicate that to others in an interesting way. Don’t make extra work for yourself: if you try to come up with something witty and insightful every day, the blog will become a burden, and eventually join the millions of others abandoned in cyberspace.

Ed.: What are your plans for the future?

DAB: I hope I can carry on doing what I am doing. Last month I had nearly 1500 views – or whatever it is that WordPress.com Blog Stats counts – which is my highest total to date, nearly 8 times as many as back in January. Perhaps I’ll get a lick of paint in coming months, and an upgrade to WordPress 2.7. I might add some new features – it’s been fascinating watching the Feedjit stats- but nothing too flash (does anyone really like those screenshots that popup when your mouse hovers over a link?) Personally I find the DA Feed very useful – there might be something more clever we could do there, with OPML for example.

Ed.: Thank you very much for your time.

DAB: The pleasure’s all mine. See you next year.

I just spotted a posting from a fellow Antipodean, made to the Australian Archivists (aus-archivists) listserv, which has certainly raised some interesting questions surrounding web 2.0 technologies and their impact on the Archive sector…. Perhaps a debate well worth monitoring, and further exploring here, within the realm of web 2.0 itself?

See Australian Archivists listserv posting below:

Archival institutions are increasingly using social networking sites, tagging (folksonomies), blogs, wikis, and Flickr to promote their collections. Does anyone know any studies evaluating this phenomenon in the archival setting? I don’t mean the this-is-how-we-did-it, isn’t-it-exciting or look-how-many-hits-we’re-getting articles. I mean thoughtful consideration of the value of these tools and the effects they are having on our work. I’d also love some discussion on the list.

Why we have decided to use these tools? What benefits have they brought? What kind of new audiences are they attracting? How long do these audiences stick around? Is the resource taken to sustain these ‘relationships’ worth it? Do these audiences engage with us beyond the social network stuff? Do they use our databases? come in and use our collections? order quality copies? Does it matter if they don’t? How is our adoption of these tools affecting what material we choose to process and promote? With user-generated content and tagging are our formal documentation skills, cataloguing standards, thesauri, etc passé? Does mashing trivialise our research collections? Any observations or leads to articles welcome. [ Helen Yoxall, Archives Manager, Registration and Collection Management, Powerhouse Museum, PO Box K346, Haymarket NSW 1238, Australia, URL: www.powerhousemuseum.com/archives/index.asp]“

After a quick (and rudimentary) search, I stumbled across a few sources that may be of interest:

• UKOLN have a presentation “Web 2.0: Implications For The Cultural Heritage Sector”
• The Archives & Museum Informatics Museums and the Web website, includes a paper “Towards Community Contribution: Empowering Community Voices On-Line” (Angèle Alain, Library and Archives Canada, Canada; Michelle Foggett, The National Archives of England and Wales, UK). It refers to Web 2.0 and community involvement in museums, libraries and archives e.g. the Moving Here project which has sought to “break down barriers to the direct involvement of minority ethnic groups in sharing their history on-line” and is among other projects keen to “embrace social networking in future to give users a higher profile voice to enable their knowledge to be passed down to the next generation”. (However, “specialised and appropriate training” was identified as crucial to tackling the barriers,[such as the 'digital divide' itself]). On the related MuseumsComputerGroup website is the article abstract “Museums and Web 2.0: Connections + Community” (by Jennifer Trant, Archives and Museum Informatics), noting both the possibilities, and challenges, surrounding the adoption of web 2.0.
• Also of interest are the web 2.0 blogs: Library 2.0 network, Library 2.0 gang, Museum 2.0; and while I couldn’t spot an Archives 2.0-specific blog anywhere, there was an interesting posting on the Archives Hub blog and on ArchivesNext (which, as one of its aims, invites bloggers to explore “Web 2.0 applications and discussing their applicability to archival institutions”).
• Our own dablog has highlighted one dimension of the web 2.0 impact (inspired by UCL’s Dr Andrew Flinn) i.e. in relation to urgent calls to preserve the heritage outputs of web 2.0, due to “the transient history of the increasing number of minority/dissenting voices, whose heritage is only documented via websites, blogs, wikis and social software”.
• In true folksonomic Web 2.0 style, we can also see what’s been tagged as Archives2.0 in del.icio.us.

Know of any other sources that discuss the impact of Web 2.0 on the Archives Sector? Or would you like to share your opinions in response to the questions posed by Helen Yoxall (above)?