I recently stumbled upon a brilliant website called The Diary of Samuel Pepys
. In case you're not familiar with the gentleman I refer to in the title of this post, he was a naval administrator and MP in his time who rubbed shoulders with Newton (him of gravity and mechanics), was an early president of the Royal Society, but remains best known for the detailed diary he maintained for nine years from 1660 to 1669 (he was also played by Neddie Seagoon in a Goon Show episode entitled The Flea, but that's quite another thing entirely).
I'm fascinated by the potential historical significance of blogs - I don't suppose I'll ever be famous, but it'll be fantastic to tell my family, "Hey, want to know what I was doing from 2003 to 2009? It's all on the Internet!". How cool is that? That's a lot of writing from a fast-growing-much-grousing part of my life, so it'll be quite interesting to myself eventually, sitting somewhere in the twilight of my years looking back on myself (I reflect so much I feel like a opposing pair of mirrors sometimes). Reading my old blog posts is already a pleasure I indulge occasionally. My Twitter feed is also accumulating the nail-clipper-droppings of my daily life - nothing of any use to me now, or even in the near future, but wouldn't it be awesome to look back on my life in, say, October 2009, with the kind of almost creepy near-hourly perspective that Twitter allows for? And remember how much I enjoyed just being able to find a double-decker bus to or from work?
Samuel Pepys is, to my mind, that principle stretched to its ultimate conclusion. He was a skilled writer and journalist, and was in the centre of the tumult of his times - if you'd been reading blog since September, you'd have read his wonderful description of his experience of the Great Fire of London, 1666. The blog is true-to-date, too: entries are put up exactly 343 years after they occured. Too busy to follow the complete journal? Snippets of his life are of course available on Mr. Pepys' Twitter feed.
Another reason this website dazzles and astounds me is how well this potentially bland, text-only information is organized. I haven't had a chance to read the encyclopedic articles (I only believe in one encyclopedia, anyway), but the in-text annotations, the Also on this day summaries of local weather conditions and other journals, and fantastically cross-referenced names (such as Mr. Thomas Hayter) really bring the text to life. My current unformed impression of information science is that it consists entirely of people sitting around figuring out the best way of presenting, say, a large amount of text-only content, in a way that would be fun to look at and work with, attractive to new readers, and clean and useful to existing readers. Information like this deserves to be made available in a form like this website, which does justice to what I like to think (romantically, I know) would have been a goal of its writer.
Doing something like that for a living would be completely awesome.
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