The 100 Year Legacy: Just Marketing or Brilliant Tactic to Create a Better Web?

WP Motivate
WP Motivate
The 100 Year Legacy: Just Marketing or Brilliant Tactic to Create a Better Web?
/

At WordCamp US, Matt Mullenweg announced that WordPress.com would be offering 100-Year domain and hosting plans for $38,000. Kathy and Michelle take a look at whether or not this is a marketing strategy or something that inspires us to consider what 100 years actually looks like. Kathy mentions the work done by mystery schools 100 years ago and the archives that have been maintained of their work, notably with the work of Edgar Cayce. What would that kind of work look like 100 years from now? Is this just an ego boost thinking that anything we post is that important, or could this consideration be used as a mental framework to inspire us to create more meaningful work that is deserving of archiving for 100 years or longer? When democratizing publishing, a focus on preserving the viewpoints of all instead of just a few media conglomerates better serves humanity.  Also, get your photos and writing off of the platforms built by others so that you have more control over how those are archived for the future.

In this episode

Episode Transcript

Intro 00:00:00 Start your week smiling with your friends, Kathy Zant and Michelle Frechette. It’s time to get ready for some weekly motivation with WP Motivate.
Speaker 1 00:00:13 Happy Friday, Kathy.
Speaker 2 00:00:16 Happy Friday. Michelle, here we are.
Speaker 1 00:00:19 Oh my goodness. Another week. T G I f I have my voice back. It’s a good thing. All the things. Yep.
Speaker 2 00:00:26 Your, your glow is back. You’re, uh, recovered from all of the word camping.
Speaker 1 00:00:32 Yes. The glow is a filter, though. Don’t let the glow surprise you. . That’s, that’s hundred percent a filter on Zoom and some lovely lighting.
Speaker 2 00:00:41 Oh, that’s funny. .
Speaker 1 00:00:44 But yes, I am recovered. I’m still a little sore, like, you know, I’m not used to being physically as active as I am when I’m gone for a week like that. So, um, yeah. So yeah. But next week I’m on vacation and I have four days booked into an Airbnb just to do bird watching and nature photography. So back in, grounding myself back into my element. Yeah. Looking forward
Speaker 2 00:01:10 To it. That is so awesome. Good for you. Thank you.
Speaker 1 00:01:12 Good for you. Thank you. About time, huh?
Speaker 2 00:01:15 Apparently I have a vacation happening next month, but mm-hmm. , it just kind of came up outta the blue. I’m pretty excited about it. And, uh, yeah. So here, here are two vacations.
Speaker 1 00:01:28 Absolutely. Here, I got a water. I’ll, Dr. I’ll, I’ll raise my water to you. .
Speaker 2 00:01:32 I’ve got my, how about, how about this for a segue? I’ve got my, uh, wordpress.com Uh
Speaker 1 00:01:38 Oh.
Speaker 2 00:01:39 Tumblr thingy. Oh
Speaker 1 00:01:40 My gosh. It’s like you just Phoenix, like you just set me up on purpose for that one. Woo-hoo. Okay. So what we’re talking about today is the hundred year hosting U r l, you know, whatever plan that was released last week during Word Camp US that for 38. No, wait, wait, wait. You have to say this like a used car salesman for the low, low price of $38,000. You could have a hundred years of hosting, a hundred years of your domain name guaranteed for 100 years guaranteed is a little scary when you’re talking about a hundred years. Right? Like, if, if you like
Speaker 2 00:02:23 Think back a hundred years ago, what was happening in like, it’s what, 2020, like my years, right? 2023. We hadn’t even had
Speaker 1 00:02:31 Prohibition
Speaker 2 00:02:32 In 1923 . The, the Great Depression 1929 had not happened yet. It was the Roaring twenties mm-hmm. . And we
Speaker 1 00:02:43 Hadn’t the stuff, stock market
Speaker 2 00:02:44 Crash stuff happening.
Speaker 1 00:02:45 Most people didn’t own cars. Right. Most people didn’t have telephones in their homes.
Speaker 2 00:02:52 Hitler was still painting. I hope he was ,
Speaker 1 00:02:55 He was still an art student. Oh my goodness. Right. We hadn’t hit World War II and all the atrocities of that. So it’s amazing. If you think about like, let’s say I bought that domain today. I mean, it would be nice if I could afford that domain today, but I, in a, in a, in a dream world, let’s say I, I pivoted Michelle forhe.com for a hundred years. What the hell do I have to say that somebody wants to read it? Hundred years ? I dunno. I don’t know. I mean, I think about building a legacy, but is it, is your legacy something you say about yourself or is your legacy something that other people say about you? Or maybe both? I don’t know. What are your thoughts on
Speaker 2 00:03:40 Well, I think it’s a little bit of both. I mean, if, if you think back to, let’s see, an author, Rudolph Steiner popping into my head, the father I know that philosophy and the Waldorf schools and stuff. So he was pretty active a hundred year, I think it was about a hundred years ago. Edgar Casey was very active a hundred years ago, and he was doing psychic greetings for like all the rich and famous people and stuff and mm-hmm. , I was just fascinated by all of the like, esoteric mystery schools and stuff that was happening. Like doesn’t seem to be happening now anymore, but like a hundred years ago it was the, it was the rage. If I was alive a hundred years ago, I would’ve been into it books. It was all books. Mm-hmm. . And so like Edgar Casey, like he did these psychic grief.
Speaker 2 00:04:26 He was the sleeping prophet. You, I heard these stories of like, people who had an illness would come to him and he would go to sleep and his secretary would write down everything that he would say on in this trance state. And like people would say like, oh, I’ve got this weird illness, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he’d say, okay, go to this. Go to this, uh, pharmacy in Cincinnati on seventh Street and have them get oil of smoke. And they’d be like, okay, okay. That’s what he said to do. Let’s go find it. So they’d go and the place would be like, we don’t have oil of smoke. And then they’d go back and say, they don’t have it. Like you said it was there, tell ’em it’s behind the purple bottle. And they’d go back, it’s behind the purple bottle. Like crazy weird stories.
Speaker 2 00:05:11 But the cool thing about Edgar Casey is like, they, there’s like this whole foundation where they took all of his readings and they’re all like archived in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and you could like go read all of these readings mm-hmm. and things that he would say about like health and spirituality and the thing, he was really super Christian and that he did readings about reincarnation and past lives and all this stuff. And it was like kind of challenging for him that like when he was in trance, this stuff would come through. There’s that, there’s an intense legacy there. They documented every reading. Mm-hmm. , it’s a life’s work. And whether or not I ever need oil smoke in Cincinnati, probably not. Right? But you never know. Just the fact that that was, you never know. But I’d like, like I think back a hundred years ago and, and that legacy exists, what am I writing it, it kind of actually, when, when they announced this, I’m like, oh, cool marketing gimmick.
Speaker 2 00:06:05 We got, we’re all gonna be talking about this now. But it really kind of put me into sort of the state of like the words that I write and that I have online. The internet is going to, I hope be around in hundred years. And my words are going to either going to be a record of whatever inspiration and creativity came through me, or they’re gonna be complete garbage or they’re gonna be memes. I don’t even know. But everything we’re putting out there, I think it does have an impact. And it changed, it changed the, the, it changed the weight that I give to my own writing. Mm-hmm. . So like I’m writing my blog post for this week. I wrote like my word camp thing, my retro on, on Word Camp, but I’m writing another blog post and I am thinking about the next a hundred years and like, what is the meaning? It really changed the way I think about my own writing. So
Speaker 1 00:06:58 I think,
Speaker 2 00:07:00 I think this is pretty cool.
Speaker 1 00:07:02 I do too. I just think like, if I was actually gonna do it, would I make it be like all about me or would I make a project that could, people could continue to contribute to for a hundred years? Right. So I dunno. I mean, I haven’t really, it’s funny to me in a lot of ways, right? Because when I think about it applied to myself, I’m like, Hmm, I don’t know. But I can think of a lot of things. Like I think back to like, we all are aware of archive.org. Like I don’t ever want that to go away. Yeah. Right. Um, and I’m gonna use a word that’s pretty ubiquitous in when WordPress, but Gutenberg, there’s, prior to there being Gutenberg blocks and whatever, there is the Gutenberg project, which actually archives online works of our, or wor, I’m sorry, written works that are no longer mm-hmm.
Speaker 1 00:07:50 that are in the public domain. Oh. Struggling with words today. But you can find entire, um, books on the Gutenberg project, but you can read online because they’re in the public domain. And so those are available to people for years and years and years. And when you think about the censorship that started happening here in the United States recently, um, and that has happened over time, right? The book burnings, um, during World War ii, you know that there’s so many other countries right now where North Korea, for example, they’re really, they, they really control what you have access to, right? So the idea of having an open project like that, that people could contribute to where somebody who’s in Florida and can’t get a copy of the Handmaid’s Tale in their public library could still access it online. Yes, of course you can buy things, right? But not everybody has the ability to just buy the books that they want. So finding things like that, and that’s not in the public domain, I understand that, but in general, I’m speaking Yeah. To be able to have access to some of those things online that then people could, those kinds of have stories could, are not lost, I guess is what
Speaker 2 00:09:03 I’m trying to say. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and you know, we, we’ve been through some censorship like in the past 20 years. Like the, the media, I remember when I was in college, I remember doing a, a talk on how media was conglomerating into, and pretty soon it would be like four companies that control all of the media. Oh, what does tooth say? Or I was, but like the media is controlled by a lot of . It, it’s just like an, a small number of corporations mm-hmm. . And I think there’s some conspiracy theories that it’s all like BlackRock anyway, so like BlackRock controls mm-hmm. all of the mainstream media. And I think like this idea of giving, giving, um, a solid foundation for, for like individual, um, journalists, um, to be able to, to research and communicate their work, the investigative journalism, anything like that, or perspectives or, um, in the medical field, like a doctor that finds research and that big pharma doesn’t want to have put out those types of things to be able to like say this is the work of record of everyone.
Speaker 2 00:10:17 And it’s not just one company that, you know, like owns C N N and well, everything’s changed and Pfizer doesn’t like this thing that you wrote 1997 and it’s still online and oops, oops. Lost that server. That kind of thing. Right. Right. That, that the, that the, um, history of, of what we’re living in can’t be conglomerated into just a few hands. It’s all of us. It’s your experience. It’s my experience. It’s, it’s watching nine 11 and seeing something happen and a collective, um, communication. That’s your perspective, my per everybody’s perspective of living through a large event like that and having that being solidified. I think there’s a, I mean, that’s the dream of what the internet is all about, that it gives everybody a voice. And I like the idea of not just giving everybody a voice, but giving everyone a history and a legacy.
Speaker 2 00:11:12 Mm-hmm. . Because when we start thinking about what we’re publishing online, it’s not just landing pages that’s make a sale. And it’s, it’s our thoughts. And, and a lot of people are just putting it on Facebook or Twitter or X or threads or they’re putting it on all of these platforms that are again, controlled by a lot of small or these large corporations. Mm-hmm. a small number of them. And I love the idea of like saying, no, everybody’s voice matters and these deeper thoughts really matter mm-hmm. . And let’s give those a legacy for, so that future generations can look back and say, oh, well big companies say this is how things were. But look at, at Mic Michelle’s perspective is pretty different. I wonder why. And like,
Speaker 1 00:11:58 Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:11:59 I, I think it, we do humanity a better service.
Speaker 1 00:12:03 The other thing I think it could be really useful for is like about, I don’t know, 10 years ago I had the thought that I don’t need to save photos ’cause I put ’em on Facebook and they’ll always be there. Right. Well, they’re not always gonna be there. Someday Facebook’s gonna go away. Probably it’ll be, you know, or it’ll be like, MySpace is, it’s just gonna kind of hang there, whatever. But if I don’t download the photos from there that I really want, that I didn’t keep, they could be lost to me forever. Right. Like, and, and any, we, we, we don’t rent space there. We literally were invited in and we could get kicked out. So if your account gets suspended or abolished or whatever, then you lose all of that historical, anything that you posted there. And I think about the fact that like, you could set up like, for lack of a better idea too, but like a genealogy for your family and have a project that goes back hundreds of years and that for the next hundred years people could, in your family, could continue to add to. You could have photo albums on there, complete albums that anybody in your family or organization or whatever could continue to visit and see and download and interact. And you could have forums like we do in Facebook and things like that for your own family to have and leave their legacy and comments for differently than it’s when it’s hosted on somebody else’s platform and where they have control over that so
Speaker 2 00:13:22 Much. Right. Right. So while the
Speaker 1 00:13:24 Price tag is still too much , it’s a great idea. Well,
Speaker 2 00:13:30 Storing everything on Facebook, we’re using that service. Mm-hmm. We’re building our legacy. We’re building our history on someone else’s land. We are not paying for it there. That means that we are the product we’re being marketed to and our information is all being fed to advertisers so that they can select who they want to serve ads to. And we are the product and there’s no promise whatsoever of that being there forever. It, it feels like it’s gonna be ’cause it’s been, it’s gosh and internet years that Facebook has been around forever, but there’s no promise of it. We’re mm-hmm. We’re using it for free. There’s no Yep. We don’t own it. We don’t
Speaker 1 00:14:08 Own, which is why
Speaker 2 00:14:10 Anything that we put there,
Speaker 1 00:14:11 I mean, which is why we tell people WordPress instead of Wix or Squarespace or other things where you own the installation, you put it on your own hosting, you can download it, you own that, you can port it someplace else as long as you’re maintaining the backups you’re supposed to maintain. Um, but with Facebook you don’t get back. You’re curing it for I know, right. It’s like, is there a way to download all your photos off Facebook? I’m gonna be doing a little research coming up because the posting, I’ve done some great postings over there, but I want those pictures. Right. Like, not all of them, because I don’t care about the refrigerator I sold four years ago, but , there’s a lot of other, a lot of other photos of my daughter. It’s like, you know, and, and a lot of those I had and um, you know, paper printed photos, but I don’t even know where all those boxes are right now. And if I could just download the ones that were important to me, that would be kind of cool.
Speaker 2 00:15:00 There’s a way of doing it. I’m gonna research it and we’ll add it to the show notes for this. Oh, I love that. Thank you. So that you can go and you can go and uh, perfect. We’ll also add, uh, security checkup on Facebook. ’cause I just had somebody do that too. Ooh, nice. Of just like making sure that other stuff is private and making sure that you don’t Yeah. You know, candy Crush still doesn’t have access to information. , that kind of
Speaker 1 00:15:22 Stuff. I’m sure Candy Crush probably has my, my blood type. I don’t know. and I don’t played Candy Crush in 10 years or however long. I don’t know. Years. Years,
Speaker 2 00:15:33 Exactly. Gosh, man. You remember the early days of Facebook when we were like throwing like pigs at each other? Were you on that early like 2008 when it was just like you were poking Easter Eggs people and throwing ?
Speaker 1 00:15:44 It was like the Easter egg hunt. You found Easter eggs everywhere in Farmville. I did. I used to like, I literally went out of town and one of my coworkers farmed my land for me in Farmville so that I wouldn’t come back to dead cyber crops. I mean, craziness.
Speaker 2 00:16:00 Oh my gosh, that is so funny. Yeah. That is so funny. We’ve been through a lot with you Facebook. We sure have
Speaker 1 00:16:07 . That’s right. That’s
Speaker 2 00:16:08 Right. Yeah. I, I think, you know, my first take on this whole like a hundred years thing was like good marketing because now we’re all talking about it. Absolutely. And if we’re talking about it, that’s marketing, right? Yes. So I thought it was brilliant marketing, but then I literally started thinking more differential about how I’m writing mm-hmm. . So it, it was more than marketing. It really did plant a seed for Yeah. How I consider my words on the internet. Mm-hmm. . That’s a scary thought. ,
Speaker 1 00:16:40 I have
Speaker 2 00:16:40 Not blathering up.
Speaker 1 00:16:42 I just renewed a domain today that I think I’ve had for about eight years and have never developed because I don’t really know how to develop. Exactly. I want it to be a WordPress site clearly. But I don’t know how to put the infrastructure together for it. But it’s the perfect domain for a hundred year domain. So we’ll talk offline. ’cause if I say it out loud here, then people are gonna be like, when are you building it? And I’m like, I dunno, . Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, I paid 20, 20 bucks a year for this domain for the last eight years. I should probably do something with it sooner or let it go, but I just couldn’t let it go this morning. I had to pay for it again. Yeah. We’ll talk after we after we hit record. Anybody else really wants to know. You could dmm me. I’d be happy to discuss it with you. If you think you went in on the bottom line. It will not be a moneymaker. I promise you that. ’cause I only build presents for the community, gifts for the community . So I don’t think it’ll make money. Yeah. But I think it’s a good legacy piece. So we’ll talk, we’ll talk later about this, but Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:17:40 All right. I’m in intrigued. I’m very intrigued. Intrigued.
Speaker 1 00:17:43 Right. And, and if you are listening and we always ask you guys, come on, somebody message us. We want want it. We want your
Speaker 2 00:17:49 .
Speaker 1 00:17:50 Please. Please us. Oh people. Us
Speaker 2 00:17:53 . It was so funny when we, when we were talking about the people that we wanted to see at Word Camp and we like teased it of like, did we drop your name? Oh my gosh. Like there are some views. We know, we know you narcissists out there. So
Speaker 1 00:18:06 Tell us what, you drop the new names. Tell us what you would build a hundred year website. The hundred year project. Yeah. A hundred year website. What would you, what would your topic or your general idea be? Would it be family, would it be project oriented? What would you, or what site would you visit that had a hundred year plan on it? We wanna know a little bit more. Little bit more. I think it’s fun to talk about. Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:18:28 For sure. I think it’s brilliant. I can’t wait to see what people have to say.
Speaker 1 00:18:32 I also, you know, it is, you know, there’s that, that little bit of morbidity that it will outlive you. But I mean, everything’s gonna outlive us everything. Like, you know, obviously, but my house will be here long after I’m gone. You know, there’s, my town will be here long after. There’s things that will be here after I’m gone. Um, legacy is one of those things, but also like, yeah, what are you building today that might actually still be helping people in a hundred years? Tell us all about it. Yeah, so I’m on vacation next week, so we will be skipping a week, um, because I’m gonna be out with the birds so I won’t be doing a call in. So we, we will miss next week. We’ll see you all the week after that. Um, and yeah, but in the meantime, let us know. We wanna, we wanna know. So I won’t see you in a hundred years, Kathy, but I will see you in two weeks,
Speaker 2 00:19:17 . Sounds good. Have a great vacation. You deserve it. Thank
Speaker 1 00:19:21 You. Thank you. And we’ll, uh, don’t hang up yet. ’cause I’m gonna tell you my, my idea when we get off call off the call. But anybody else, you’re free to guess. Free to guess, but you know, whatever. I’ll talk to you later. Anyway, , thanks for hanging out again. We’ll see you later. Bye.
Speaker 2 00:19:36 Bye.
Outro 00:19:37 This has been WP Motivate with Kathy Zant and Michelle Frechette. To learn more or to sponsor us, go to wpmotivate.com.