Friday, April 20, 2007

What Happens to the Blog When the Blogger Dies?

Before this happened, US Peace Corps volunteer and journalist Julia Campbell recorded a good bit of her experiences in her Blogspot weblog, JULIA IN THE PHILIPPINES. She says in her Blogger profile
At the age of 38, I decided to step out of the rat race of New York, join the Peace Corps and board a plane for Manila. This blog is dedicated to my adventures in the Philippines for the next two years. Wish me luck.
In her last entry (Jan 17, 2007) --ironically entitled Buhay Pa Tayo--she evinces Oriental fatalism in the face of several of experiences exposing her to Nature's naked furies.

In Julia and the Volcano (some great pix in this post) and She's Been Swallowed by a Giant Whaleshark, one gets a sense of the grand adventure Julia was on. Reading Julia Campbell's posts now after she was found in a shallow grave in Banaue, Ifugao province are painful and poignant. Don't know how long these posts get to stay up when the authors pass away like this... Hopefully, the good folks at Blogger will leave the weblog of Julia Campbell up...

3 comments:

Amadeo said...

Her last blog entry has become some kind of memorial, where readers drop by and leave their kind comments. Quite moving.

A little trivia, Julie also came from the state of Virginia, where the most horrid massacre took place.

Marcus Aurelius said...

As to the question. I do not see why blogger would close a blog in such cases. Perhaps after a fairly long period of inactivity the blog does get purged, but Google with their ability to maintain the storage they do, I think it will be up for a long time yet.

Dom Cimafranca said...

Hi, DJB: it's thanks to your blog that I found Julia Campbell's. It feels eerie reading through the entries, knowing the writer is no longer with us. So sad, really.

I don't think Blogger has really done any purging of its blogs. Witness all the abandoned blogs dating back to well before the Google acquisition. Google might well run out of subdomains before it runs out of disk space. Maybe 10, 20, 50, or 100 years from now, these will all be interesting cultural artifacts. You know, slice of life in the roaring 2000's.

That said, when I do go, I would at least like my blog to make mention of my passing. But since a blog post from beyond the grave isn't scientifically possible, that leaves three options:

1) Give someone else the password to my blog. A bad idea, considering the Google account is tied to so many other services.

2) Assign a trusted person co-author rights to the blog. A somewhat better option.

3) Put account, password, and final message in a will. "In the event of my passing, this is the final post to my blog...."

A little morbid, I know, but something to consider in view of how much loving care we put into our blogs.