This is pretty cool electronic implemenation of a more traditional pasttime:
Send an email time capsule to yourself
Mark Frauenfelder: Forbes has a free service that lets you send an email to yourself and have it arrive in 1, 3, 5, 10, or 20 years. I’m going to have my daughter write one to herself. I’ll write one to myself, too.
This capsule must be submitted by November 30th, however. Forbes isn’t the only one to do something like this.
futureme.org has been doing this for a few years, a better implementation than forbes. they let you choose the exact date to send the email, up to 35 years in the future.
One of the differences here is the level of backup protection that Forbes is implementing. That’s certainly something to consider.
I don’t know why I’m so attracted to the idea. What’s the best way to use something like this…as a future encouragement? As something of a journal entry, “See how far I’ve come”? Use it as a reminder service?
I’m not sure. It might just be nice to sit down and write up a full ‘this is what’s going on in the world, and my life” kinda post.
How would you handle a time capsule as a child? You’d put in your baseball cards and things that were meaningful to you at the time. Then, 25 years later you’d wonder what all the fuss was about.
The question is how to handle physical objects. This is the kind of thing that you want to “launch and forget”. You could find a place that you could store electronic files, and store some PDFs or MP3s or whatever, and post links to it in your email.
Here’s the problem though.. can you be sure it’ll be there in 20 years? Forbes will guarantee the actual email, but not anything else.
Think Comcast will still be here? Or Google? *laugh* Imagine reading your blog 20 years from now.
That’s what you need to do… export all of your blog as a text file and save that.