Jim Groom’s talk focuses on archiving and the idea of what it means to archive. Not only that he also talks about what are the different ways to archive. To my surprise he did not say that all archiving is done online. We have been archiving in one way or another all our lives.

Archiving could be anything as simple as saving all your work from College on a hard drive or thumb drive. This although not as fancy as archiving stuff on the web is a way to save something and be able to find it years later. Groom even said during his lecture that when he was younger he would archive by writing in a notebook. The Point is there are multiple ways of doing so.

Whichever way that one decides to archive whether it be through a personal blog or flickr, SoundCloud or Youtube the point is that it can be brought back to life if you will because it can be found. Now, it would be easier to find if it were linked to or had a lot of hits, but the point is it can be.

This next part was a sidetrack moment in his lecture, but certainly a cool part of it seeing as I learned something new. Groom explained something that neither the students in his classroom or myself understood. That is how Google works. We knew that it can spit out all the information, but we didn’t know how top hits on a particular Google search come about. He says simply that if you have something about yourself online, which everyone should, then it will show up high on a Google search if it has been linked or looked at enough times. This becomes extremely important for that inevitable moment when a potential future employer Google’s you because it gives you a digital space online you can call your own and that is the importance of archiving.

In terms of my own personal website archiving and creating my own digital space even before ds106 I must say I always did find it important that I did have a presence online. That If I Googled myself, which I do every once in a while, something more would show up than my Facebook and Twitter profiles. The main reason it’s important to me is that when people Google my name they know everything that I do outside of school.

For this reason I will definitely keep my blog after this class is over. I learned to do quite a few things this semester that I can apply for a long time. In doing so and putting my blogs name out there I can use the blog almost as a portfolio of stuff I’ve messed around with.