DIY: Digital trash

Lamprecht & Moderegger sign for digital dump, New Scientist

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Most of us have had to clean files off that overloaded hard drive eventually: at least this was true before the days of terabyte drives. But inventory in an MMORPG or a virtual world like Second Life is a different story. In-game inventory space disappears fast; in Second Life carrying around 14,000 items (at last count) can slow you down. And abandoned builds can be pretty unsightly.

There are archeologists that sift through digital trash to learn about the players, according to the New Scientist. It's a fascinating article, well worth the read. One observation that struck me is

Eventually, Lamprecht and Moderegger hit on the idea of getting the rubbish to decay... 

Suddenly the [digital] dump took on a new light. “It was hard to see things disappear; it was like living with daily loss,” says Lamprecht. Some objects were intricate, things people had put care into making. Many were no more than a few months old. “When is a digital object ready to die?” she asks. “It doesn’t look chipped, it doesn’t become spoiled, it doesn’t start to smell bad.”

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Dumpster Drive logo

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Taking the idea of digital trash dumps a step further, there's Dumpster Drive: Exchange Your Digital Trash with Strangers, which operates on the premise that one person's trash may be another person's treasure. Currently it's only available for Mac OSX 10.6+; you can learn more about the application and download it at the Dumpster Drive site. There are some thoughtful comments about it at PCWorld.

If you're really serious about cleaning up your machine, here are 5 tactics for dumping digital trash, proposed by a study at Johns Hopkins University. The study itself is in PDF format and can be found at the Cornell University Library e-print archive. As an aside, I'll bet Google and other portals like Flickr and Tumblr have a lot of digital trash to deal with.


-- Marge