How will history look back at our blogging?

Diaries, journals, blogs, instant messages?

All are ways of chronicling our thoughts, ideas, daily happenings. Will the new mediums have the staying power the older formats have had? Will people 200 years from now be able to get a glimpse into our world, a picture of our society, by looking back at what we blogged about?

The New York Times last week featured an article about a family that has kept letters written to one another for more than 200 years, creating one of the largest private family collections of its kind.

And they've adapted how they save these historical family records to our modern technological age. A younger member of the family, Ethan Cowan, a 20-year-old cinema studies major, saves his instant messages on his computer to read again later.

This is new ground.

When you write on a page, the simple act of doing so records what you are saying in a semi-permanent fashion, barring flood or fire. It takes a little more effort -- and foresight -- to decide that something you are instant messaging about might be worthy of preservation for future generations. You have to cut and paste into some other document, and save it to a file. Otherwise it is gone when you click on the X to close the dialog box.

And blog entries will have to be archived. Will anyone bother, at some distant future point, to look back through the archives to see if we said anything worthwhile? Should we print out our blogs and file them away in some more traditional form, the types of documents that historians are used to analyzing?

There's a different feel to reading something on the cold, white screen of a computer monitor compared to the velvety feel of a time-worn page. But it's a different world.