This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: Word and permanence Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

Chris Pratley talks about blogging - and in the process of talking about Word, hits on something relevant to any blogger:

A couple of people have asked about the permanence of electronic information and access to it in the future if it is in Word format. Microsoft takes this very seriously. That's one of the reasons we make the format documentation available to governments and other institutions, so that there is no concern that they will not have the ability to access the information at a later date. Personally, I find this whole discussion a little bit overwrought though. If it is access to the content of a Word doc that is a concern, just about any word processor available today can import Word documents sufficiently that you can access their content. You don 19t need a Microsoft product for that.

I've talked about this before - anything you write on a blog should be considered permanent. There have been somewhat embarrassing disclosures of old draft information found in word documents - but that's nothing compared to the permanence of what goes on a blog. Ultimately, you just can't delete your content. Why not? Well, your content got cached all over the place:

• Feedster
• BlogDigger
• Google
• Gosh knows how many client aggregators

I fully expect to see political campaigns using this as oppo research in a few years - imagine the 45 year old candidate for some office being called on stuff he wrote on a blog 20 years back - still available through some kind of search service. It's not going to affect only politics, either - employers are already doing google searches for references when a person is being considered for a job - a blog is the ultimate paper trail. Compared to that, Word documents are ephemeral....