BlogForever

There are many common questions that come up when discussing about BlogForever.

What is a blog?

A blog (a contraction of the term “weblog”) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order.

Are you planning to preserve all existing blogs?

No, or at least not yet. We are making a software platform capable of preserving blogs. To preserve all existing blogs, someone would have to build a large data center and use our software platform. We are going to preserve specific sets of blogs in our case studies (WP5: Case studies & validation) in order to test BlogForever.

Are you going to create a web portal/service which will preserve blogs just like the Internet Archive preserves websites?

No, or at least not yet. We will create a prototype software platform capable of preserving blogs. We will also test this prototype in specific case studies with limited numbers of blogs. Nevertheless, if anyone would like to use our software to create such a service, he or she will be able to do so.

There are many web preservation projects already available. What is different & innovative about BlogForever?

The BlogForever project aims to provide complete and robust digital preservation, management and dissemination facilities for weblogs that will support extensive accessibility, management and dissemination features of the archived information. Recognising the undeniable social and cultural value of weblogs, the project aims to introduce a weblog digital preservation repository system, which will feature a variety of added-value services.

• Enable weblog content browsing in a consistent and harmonized way with the additional capabilities of advanced searching, sorting and topic clustering.
• Provide the public with a selected subset of the preserved information structured in various ways based on context.
• Provide facilities for knowledge extraction, classification and data interaction.

BlogForever will facilitate advances to the state of the art in the following areas:

1. Definition of a generic data model for weblog metadata and semantics.
2. Weblog digital preservation strategies
3. Weblog spider
4. Weblog digital repository web application

Who will decide which blogs should be preserved and which shouldn’t?

The selection of blogs which should be preserved depends on the administrators of a potential BlogForever installation. They would choose which blogs they would like to preserve according to their policies & needs. For example, a university would create a BlogForever installation and preserve all the faculty’s blogs or a football club would like to preserve sports blogs. There are endless use cases.

What about spam blogs/content? Are you going to preserve them too?

As already mentioned, the administrators of a BlogForever installation define a list of blogs to be preserved. If the administrators choose to preserve spam blogs, then BlogForever can preserve spam blogs too. It must be noted though that BlogForever will have facilities to detect spam content and flag it accordingly.

What parts of a blog are you going to preserve? The blog data, the layout of each page, the blog post comments?

We define a blog as a web site with a series of entries displayed in reverse-chronological order. For each one of these entries called blog posts, we are going to preserve:

• the post content
• the post page layout
• the comments related to this post
• metadata related to this post
• external resources linked to this post (e.g. embedded images)

What kind of software are you going to develop or use?

BlogForever will have two main software components:

• The weblog spider: BlogForever weblog spider will be based on CyberWatcher‘s web monitoring software.
• The weblog digital repository: BlogForever digital repository will be built on CERN‘s Invenio digital library web application.

What will be the final outcome of BlogForever?

The final outcome of BlogForever will be a software platform capable of aggregating, preserving, managing & disseminating blogs. Anyone will be able to install this software to their server and preserve a selection of blogs.

Are you going to sell the BlogForever outcomes?

Most of BlogForever’s outcomes will be free and/or open source to use, including the main platform’s functionality. Therefore everyone should be able to use it to preserve their blogs.

So you will monitor people’s blogs and acquire their content even if they don’t want to preserve it. Is that right?

No. We are developing our Digital Rights Management Policy (DRM), where legal aspects will be defined and operational needs or courses of action will be identified. In any case, all authors who don’t wish to see their blogs preserved, they will have an easy way to exclude them from the Blogforever platform.