Daily Archive

I have been creating stuff on the web for more about fifteen years. That thought alone depresses me – on the one hand it seems overwhelmingly huge, there’s so much of it out there accumulated over five thousand days – but on the other it all seems trivial and insubstantial, a whole load of blether, some pictures of shoes people have left behind and videos of me saying “Hi, my name’s Lloyd Davis and today I’m …”.

I want to take stock and put it all in some order.  It’s one of those things that really needs doing.  I think I know pretty much what I’m doing here now – there’s writey stuff, there’s visual stuff and there’s audio stuff and sometimes it all gets mixed up but that’s about the size of it.

If this were someone else’s stuff it wouldn’t be nearly as difficult, I’d just methodically go through all the sources compiling a database of it all, with as much metadata as is available, but at least dates and times, right?  And then design some processes for going forward. But everything I look at has an emotional charge. “Oh my god, what was I thinking?”

But let’s stick with it.  Let’s have a look at what I know I have.

So I have writing archives here on wordpress.com, and that includes several other discontinued blogs and the same goes for blogger and posterous.  There’s a little bit at storify and then I suppose there’s also writing of a sort in twitter and facebook.  Tumblr doesn’t have any original content in it, I don’t think. Ideally, I’d also like to be able to pull in any comments I made on other people’s blogs, but that’s going to be tricky.

I have over 10,000 pictures on Flickr but I think any other picture-sharing sites that I used in the past have been subsumed into that.  I think…  I have videos on YouTube and Vimeo but also Qik and Bambuser, possibly Ustream (?) and then there’s my Seesmic archive.  Everything that currently goes to Instagram gets backed up to Flickr as well as FB.

I have audio from my first podcasts on Libsyn, backed up to S3.  There’s also a bunch on Audioboo and I’ve an album on Bandcamp.

I hate the way that these are all differently integrated – ideally, I mean in that ideal world where I had a team of people to sort this out for me, I’d have everything also hosted independently and from today I’d not be using any of these services as the primary channel/home for anything.

I want to get there.  I’m just trying to work out where there really is and what is the best way to proceed.  But if you want to be as discouraged as I am, try downloading a few seconds clip from qik.com that you recorded in 2008.