Thursday, November 09, 2006

The Web, my favourite bastion of permanence

So it turns out the web is a pretty transitory place. One day a website is there and another it is gone.

This was brought home to me again today, when preparing for a project, I found that a major library website that I had used just a few days ago is now finished. It has been sucked in by that exceptionally powerful, and useful, group that is OCLC.

One starts to expect a degree of permanence on the web. Each day you wake up, run to your computer and check your email and a host of other sites. What would happen if Gmail just vanished like any of these other web based services? I wouldn’t even want to think about how much information I would lose.

This causes me to wonder if there is a way of backing up or downloading a Gmail account? I have been wondering this for a while, as it seems like it might be nice. Certainly there are things that one might want to have access to in an offline environment.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cam, you can set up Apple's Mail.app to get your gmail mail. I believe gmail provides instructions on how to do this via the settings menu. There are similar instructions for people using Thunderbird (mozilla mail, for mac and pc) and most other popular windows mail programs.

Cameron said...

Though would I not lose the structure of my conversations?