The end of the Taking Note blog

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jan 8, 2021 at 04:37 PM

Donovan wrote:
>A blog on “note taking” was a
>blog on so many erudite topics and Kuehn showed all of us his reputation
>as a polymath. Great philosopher, great man.

@ Donovan: many thanks for the web archive links to Taking Note
@ Steve: many thanks for reaching out to M. Kühn.

I find it really surprising that a blog with more than 780,000 visitors over eight years has been taken down, just two years after its last post. Without going into Hercules Poirot mode considering how this particular case may have occurred, we may have to accept that this is the future of all things that are free on the internet. As humanity keeps outputting petabytes of information, much of it worthless and often even of negative value, storage is recycled and the only priority logic may be FIFO—first in first out.

My Evernote database of web clippings now goes back 12 years; that’s not much in terms of human culture, but it is not unusual at all for me to remember a piece of important information, find it in my database, and then check the original link only to find that it is no longer there.

I am thankful for the web archive and I am thankful for Chris hosting this nice forum, even if I seldom post to it nowadays for lack of time. The forum will soon celebrate 15 years in this incarnation, and includes the archives of outliners.com which had started more than 6 years earlier…

@ Chris: it goes without saying that if you ever need financial contribution to cover the hosting costs, I’ll be more than happy to chip in.