Blogs as historical records

This is a topic that pops into my head during those times when my brain is just peacefully meandering. Blogs one day will be a treasure trove for historians. Never before have so many people been "on the record" on so many different topic. Historians looking back at events that are current affairs to us now will be able to use blog activity as a barometer of what the public opinion was during these events. Also, sooner or later, a blogger will become an important leader in this nation, perhaps even President. That person's blog will be treated as personal papers by historians. There are just a couple of problems-where will historians go to access these old blogs, and will they be able to intrepret these old blogs full of dead, formerly context providing links?

First, where will historians go to find these blogs? Right now, historians access libraries, historical scoieties, and archives all over the country and the world to find the written sources that they are looking for. Right now there is no public resource of these types for electronic resources because there is no reason for them. Why spend public dollars on repositories of electronic media when they are all available to us online? Right now, Google is our massive public library of electronic media. Google's storage capabilities allow them to store virtually everything that's on line. Having one single source control the archives of the internet is asking for those sources to be lost to history, though. What happens as Google ages as a corporation in an aging market, and they decide that instead of investing in new servers, new storage, they are going to start purging older files in their 'cache' to save money? Blogs that have long since ceased operation, their hosts out of business, will be lost to posterity. And what happens as we move out of the digital age and into the next technological big thing? Will our digital blogs go the way of the 8 track, with files available to view, but scant little equipment to view them with? I don't have the answer. As I mentioned above, public monies for archiving electronic media is very difficult to justify, as it is all available to us right now. But there is almost no profit incentive for private money to archive electric media, either. Could historians one day look back on this era and lament all of the knowledge lost because we never had the foresight to save and archive our material on the web?

Second, would future historians have difficulty deciphering blogs? After all, blogs run on the assumption that the reader has some background knowledge on the topics discussed. Where deeper background is necessary, links are provided. Historians would surely have a good knowledge of the topic at hand, but what of the deeper background. Many links in what will then be old blogs will be dead by then. Will that make some posts useless to historians? This is problem is less significant than the first, but it will lead to a little greater need for interpretation by historians, and trust me, the less interpretation a historian has to do, the better the scholarship will be ;-).

I'd be curious if anyone out there has a good knowledge of electronic storage and would be willing to speak to this post in the comments.