When the future becomes the present

Hasn't BTTF day been fun this week. The fake commercials. The Nike shoes. The $20 Pepsi. The fact that there are companies still trying to build hover boards just because a movie told them to. Back to the Future is far from the only film to predict the future, but there's been so much written this week about how different the future has been than what we've predicted. But then again, we're predicting the future all the time in the news. I think, with a little bit of effort everyday can become Back to the Future day.

News developed in a very interesting way on the Internet. In the beginning it appears the old print media jumped on line and expected readers would just like to see a scanned newspaper of that day. Very quickly this proved impractical for reading and news articles soon took on a more blog like format we see on Engadget. These also meant things can be reported on very quickly and articles can be updated as news develops, rather than having to rehash the same story with small bits of new information. Take Engadget's recent story on the Blackberry Priv. There's a small short update at the bottom. But one thing has remained the same as old print media.

Archives.

The British newspaper the times proudly has an archive going back to 1785. Two and a half centuries worth of news. Which means you'd have to read over 100 years worth of newspaper before even getting to the modern Olympic Games. For whatever reason, maybe journalistic integrity, maybe because we can, maybe because it is expected. We also have 22,127 pages of Engadget. Which will probably be over 22,200 by the time I can actually get around to finishing this article. And that's just Engadget, there are thousands of tech journals, political blogs and (shudder) news sites purely related to people who are perceived as important. Which is fantastic. We have day to day documentation of the growth of all sort of our world. And yet with this has come the fear that once we post something online it is up there forever and it can never be deleted. It is etched into a Rosetta stone which cannot be worn away with time, nor weather. And to a point, that is correct. Facebook have recently made all photos, statuses and links that were posted as "Public" searchable. And there may have been a time in the past which you were not so careful with your privacy settings and there is a post or two right now that can be found. Now that you're slightly paranoid follow these instructions to fix it, go ahead, I'll wait.

Yet the story I mentioned before about the Blackberry Priv was updated on the same day. Several tech sites, such as Android Police actually put the date and time that the update was done. but it rarely more than a few days that a news article does not get an update and a whole new article is written. It's understandable. In most cases updates take more work. If you're working on hundreds of news articles a day, it's easy to lose track of what's been said where and what needs correcting. And some things don't change for months. Websites such as Engadget organise articles around their original publishing time. The further back an article is, the less likely it's going to be re-read, the less point there is updating it.

All this being said, I think we should implement a system of revisiting old articles. Once a week or month, content management systems should present each tech blogger with an old article from the site they are on and they have the simple task of writing a short update to the story, which will then be posted to the top of site, or in it's own special section.

Why should we? If we are frequently reminded of the past, I think, not only can we fondly/not-so-fondly recall forgotten ideas, which can be reviewed with the benefit of hindsight. There's also the possibility of old ideas which didn't work at the time, being re-written as new ideas. But hopefully, we can also become much better at scrutinising the present. Let me give some possible examples.

We can now update articles about Windows Phone killing iPhone to say "Still working on it"

Speaking of iPhone, where is the red one?

That there still hasn't been a good portable media centre in years

You can now make any projector wireless using a cheap dongle sold by that weird search company that now makes software for BLACKBERRY. Seriously 2004 weird stuff is about to go down.

Holy crap the writer from before who said Windows Phone 7 would crush iPhone predicted The iPhone Plus, Macbook Air and Apple Pay in 2008

Skin analysis on a phone is weird? Now do you not only have a massive choice of skin analyser apps, you can spend $500 on one!

Audiovox did not become the Apex of mobile phones

And finally that Engadget's publishing system now supports Safari

Any other great find I'd love to know in the comments.

UPDATED (2015-10-25 5:30PM AEDST):

"Xbox Live and the ability to download new content is not a crutch to ship crappy software. And too often on the PC–I'm going to be blunt here–in the PC gaming space, games get out that developers know have problems because they know they can patch them later. They know they can force updates. And the act of playing [games online] becomes a pain in the ass, because you put the disc in and then you gotta download the patch and you gotta download the service pack and you gotta download the security hot fix, and then you gotta apply those things and reboot your machine. That's not an entertainment experience. That is not fun."
– Jeff Henshaw 2010-10-06

Can we just have that someone send that to Ubisoft? Thank you.