Why Yahoo! Needs a Chief Archivist (and I'm available): An Open Letter to Marisa Mayer →
Do something radical: Hire an archivist. Not just someone to shuffle around papers in case someone needs them or someone to keep records for your next audit, but someone to help conceptualize Yahoo! for what it truly is: a dynamic and valuable archive that people trust and return to. People have long relationships with Yahoo!, which, in terms of internet properties, this is extremely rare. In order to steer Yahoo into the future, you need to figure out how to treat its past. ( To quote Jason Scott, of ArchiveTeam “History is our future, and we’ve been trashing our history.”) As the Geocities debacle of 2009 showed, Yahoo! Has an ambivalent relationship to the past. It can’t anymore, not if it’s going to succeed.
