Software is going to be a tricky one to preserve, especially in the case of older data. Information is produced at an insane rate worldwide (think of all the blog posts, all the forums, all the art, all the image boards) but it's so ephemeral that it's lost almost as quickly as it is produced- and that's not even including the data that's been crowded out by digital obsolescence. Case in point: How much data on wax cylinder has survived to our time and been converted over to a digital format? How much data on early records? How much on 8-track, VHS, BETA, etc? Sure, we'll always have Elvis and Sinatra, as well as the words of poets like Alfred Lord Tennyson recorded with the original Edison equipment, but what about all those other nameless artists and speech-givers whose last audiotape was eaten or recorded over with a grainy feed of Britney Spears? What about all those struggling musicians who worked so hard to get their album to 8-track, only to have it go out of style like last-week's breakfast? Some might say that in this fashion, digital obsolescence is an almost Darwinian force, similar to natural selection, where only the most popular survive.

Luckily, like with the advances in medicine we've achieved over the decades, the odds for survival and growth of any given piece of information are getting better. The internet is an incredible repository for data- it's vast, nearly infinite, limited only by the amount of ones and zeros we can compress into a physical cubic inch, and as we, as a species, continue to see any data, be it blog posts or just random funny photoshops from an imageboard as being more important to preserve, the data available therein will only continue to grow.

In that case, consider the archaeologists of the future as data miners. Digging through blogs and emails caught in the darker recesses of the internet might some day prove to be just the thing to unearth the facts needed to shake up the views of historians that look back on our time and reach whatever far-off conclusions they might be inclined to make about our society, our culture, and even our world as a whole. The possibilities for centuries old blogs are endless- consider the impact the ramblings of a madman might have on our world today if they were uncovered engraved in an ancient clay tablet long forgotten in the bosom of Sumer. Just because it's ancient doesn't mean it's gospel, right?

But is it really that simple? Now that the tendrils of the internet reach to almost every corner of the globe and information is archived as if it were everything but sacred, will archaeologists finally be able to look back and see the whole story without having to guess or draw assumptions? Maybe, but only in the best case scenario. We are a great civilization, but great civilizations have fallen before, and the data we hold so dear is so ephemeral that it is almost as fragile as the ancient Grecian urn mentioned at the beginning of this piece.