Permalinks : Permafrost

Doc Searls summed up my experience over the last year with his Geology vs. Weather post:

On the other hand, blogging is geology. A blog’s posts may be current and timely, and constitute one person’s contribution to conversation around a subject or two, but each post is built to last. It has a “permalink”. Over time posts accumulate like soil deposits. You can dig down through layers of time and find them.

David Meerman Scott makes a similar point in his World Wide Rave when he advises to simply “put down roots.”  Much can be made about the effectiveness of the real time web to find engagement.  But like yesterday’s weather, yesterday’s tweets have little impact on today’s choices.  It’s transience or permanence.  Clearly engaging in transient activity has it’s place in one’s overall engagement, but we should clearly recognize when the activity is transient versus permanent.

I think producing content with an eye towards search is important.  I’m not really talking SEO, but SEP (search engine permanence).  We need to work in ways that our content gets embedded into the fabric of the web, becomes itself the silk mesh of the web.

I guess many are not focused on the archival aspect of what we are doing these days, but that’s an oversight can lead to unfortunate consequences.