As new blogs are created, older blogs continually disappear or are lost, and unease grows about the vanishing of personal records. Professional data management studies have shown that by the time new technologies have gone through four generations, information created with the methods of the first generation becomes unreadable. This means that somebody’s blog, or even public photos stored on a website, could disappear, leaving an historical gap in the public record where that person used to be. The situation with digital data parallels earlier changes in music technology. Think of the progression from cylinders to flat vinyl albums to cassette and 8-track tapes to CDs, not to mention mp3s. Who can play those music cylinders now? Similarly, a person’s digital diary on a 5 ¼” floppy disk would now be almost unreadable, as technology has progressed through 3 1/2″ disks to CD-ROM to flash drives. All that music and all that data is simple gone. If a person writes data about their whole life on blog entries, and the hosting company goes out of business, then where are that person’s thoughts and reflections? On a large scale, historians worry that whole chunks of modern history are being lost. People [...]

It’s no surprise that celebrity blogs have exploded into the blogosphere in recent years, amidst the thousands of new blogs that come into existence every day. While some of them are written by the famous people themselves, or perhaps occasionally their publicity managers, the majority of these sites were created by fans as well as those whose profession it is to dig up information about the stars. It’s likely that these news blogs, perhaps better described as gossip blogs, came first, and that part of the reason celebrity blogs began to appear was in response to these, so the stars could take back some control of their image. But for a few years, blogs that gossiped about celebrities reigned supreme. This was no surprise, of course, since wildly popular newspaper tabloids like the National Enquirer and magazines like People had been serving a similar purpose for decades. The public has always had a high interest in juicy tidbits about the rich and famous. However, it’s one thing to have “high interest” and quite another to engage in the almost manic gossip that prevails today, probably due at least in part to the rise of these supposed blogs about the stars. [...]