Detritus in Cyberspace

I was talking with blogger Belinda Blomscogg this morning and mentioned how much I enjoyed her link to Library Lovers LiveJournal. (You have to read the post that links to the YouTube video of the 61 year old librarian who was ticketed because she held up a McCain=Bush sign on the plaza outside the building in Denver where the candidate was going to speak. As she commented after being given her court date, “Why would Republicans, who voted for Bush, be offended by this?")

I had to admit, however, that I had signed up for the service and neglected to write down my username and password. How many times have we warned patrons about this? Now I am taking up another tiny useless bit of space on the web.

It seems as though we are still in the expansion phase of the web and that more efficient storage is making growth possible. What a lot of free services Google provides even as its stock goes down! How can this continue? Won’t even Google find storage too expensive and start to charge? And isn’t it green to clean up after ourselves, even in cyberspace?

Meanwhile, all our old online projects, neglected and rejected e-mail accounts, memberships in passé social networking sites are blipping around the net, like worn-out satellites in outer space. When they start to fall, who are they going to hit?