With Google products, you can use their “Data liberation” tool, where you can download your photos as a .zip file, all your profile data and contacts. Even Blogger here gives you the tools to export your whole blog. Of course it all depends on the culture of the company that holds your data: Google is not evil, facebook is, or so they say! [I am not a Google employee, or have any shares ;) ]
I think the best example is Geocities, the place to be in late 90’s, with people contributing massive personal info, only to see it gone overnight, when the site close down. Times wrote that "Yahoo! found the way to destroy the most massive amount of history in the shortest amount of time with absolutely no recourse" (http://goo.gl/QCcLv). Since then, various organisations have tried to give that data back to their creators, with Internet Archive being one of them.
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So how do we keep track of “everything”? Since our every move is now being recorded as if it is the first step on the moon, we end up with vast, un-curated data. Maybe we should ask the advertising companies how they do it, as that is where all our Social media data goes!
I would say for the individuals, data liberation, so the “crowds” can “source” at least their own data. For example, Google gives us the ability to post comments, which are automatically enriched with time and location data and photos if we wish. If (or when) we will end up downloading that data back to our computer, we will end up with a nicely curated Digital version of us.
For institutions, we could follow Google example in bringing search results, which is a combination of algorithms on websites and links. We could use that method to create a sample collection of trends, people, time and places. That algorithm can be adjusted to the functional needs of the Institution that is doing the archiving: A government institution could be focused on the government’s digital imprint, while a cultural institution on the arts of the day.
I think the mishap of Geocities will be repeated a couple of times, until this digital era loses all its previous analogue thinking and become free to roam in a world of cloud computing, social privacy and unstoppable online chatter. Then, archiving will be a normal practice, part of data exchange between institutions and companies.
