This is Tranquility Base…the Eagle has Landed…and Digital Preservation still an issue

Monday marks the 40th anniversary of the Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon.

For people of my generation, this is one of the few “you can always remember what you were doing” events that were actually positive. I still remember sitting in front of our television set and diligently following the instructions from the newspaper on how to take a photo from the television. (My kids… “Why didn’t you just DVR it?”) The anniversary seems all the more highlighted withWalter Cronkite’s passing this weekend.

The anniversary highlights a couple of themes for me…some document management related and some not.

First, thinking about the lunar landing and Walter Cronkite’s role in it reminds me how completely the nature of journalism has changed in the past 40 years. Technology has changed the nature of journalism from a one-to-many business in which the obstacles to entry were massive and content was controlled by a few to a many-to-many business in which anyone with aflip video camera can reach millions. No journalist will ever have the power of aWalter Cronkite again, which seems like a good thing. Then again, the world seems a little more hostile and callous without the Uncle Walters of the past. We now often rely on a chaotic network on bloggers and glorified paparazzi for “news.”

Continues @ http://aiim.typepad.com