I absolutely love the way that my archive is presented here. Matt and Hannah have set the bar in how to shut down a service in an honest, dignified way.
It’s a real shame that Hannah and Matt are shutting down This Is My Jam—it’s such a lovely little service—but their reliance on ever-changing third-party APIs sounds like no fun, and the way they’re handling the shutdown is exemplary: the site is going into read-only mode, and of course all of your data is exportable.
Yahoo, Google, and other destroyers could learn a thing or two from this—things like “dignity” and “respect”.
This sounds like an interesting long-term storage project, but colour me extremely sceptical of their hand-wavey vagueness around their supposedly flawless technical solution:
This technology will be revealed to the world in the near future.
Also, they keep hyping up the Svalbard location as though it were purpose-built for this project, rather than the global seed bank (which they don’t even mention).
This might be a good way to do marketing, but it’s a shitty way to go about digital preservation.