Why will future generations chant your username?

October 16, 2006 7:09 PM

Yahoo! Time Capsule, from the artist that brought you justcurio.us (Mefi'd here), is the world's first digital time capsule. Submit images, words, videos, and sounds to a digital archive that will be sealed up in Smithsonian Folkway Recordings - Users have until November 8th to make submissions, at which point the capsule will be sealed. Check out the about page for a little more information on the project and the artist's statement.
posted by TheRoach (6 comments total)

This is being advertised as a "time capsule", even the world's first "digital time capsule" - yet it is wrong on both counts. For one, other companies and services have applied the "time capsule" analogy to digital projects before (just google, it's not an original idea). For another, it's arguably not a time capsule, except by analogy. Granted it does satisfy some of the qualifications for being a time capsule: it is sealed with the express purpose of being opened at some future date to reveal something to future historians of the time when it was sealed. But it is not really "sealed" - there is no physical barrier - it is simply being stored somewhere, dependent upon the services rendered (and presumably paid for) by the Smithsonian, which, at any given time (due to funding cuts, fire, Yahoo! stock crash, lack of interest, etc..) could simply be discarded. A real time capsule would have a real vault in a location immune from outside funding. Otherwise you might as well call archive.org a time capsule with a software lock to open it on a certain date.
posted by stbalbach at 8:08 PM on October 16, 2006

This (project) will not end well.
posted by ArsncHeart at 8:28 PM on October 16, 2006

I predict the amount of porn will not be representative of reality.
posted by smackfu at 8:31 PM on October 16, 2006

I must be going soft. I was touched by the submissions I looked at and was moved to think of things that would encapsulate my life and loves.
posted by ancientgower at 9:39 AM on October 17, 2006

I've always been fond of this one and don't really understand the benefit of this Yahoo gimmick.
posted by twsf at 10:24 AM on October 17, 2006

I have this mental image of a future guy opening a similar time capsule from the 80's, and scratching his head over some giant pizza box sized floppy disk.
posted by tomble at 6:00 AM on October 18, 2006