Today, the site has 50 billion pictures posted by millions of people, making it, in Jason Scott's words, “a world heritage site”. Archivists may have kilometres of underground storage where they keep historical records, a site like Flickr is unique, as so many people contributed to it. For future generations, the sheer amount of visual data could give away a lot about life today. But Flickr isn't a given. Changing owners a few times, the site was almost killed and all content deleted. Now, at Flickr Foundation, George thinks about keeping this content for the future. And by future, she means the next 100 years.
This is probably a useful perspective: how do you keep collections long term, that are of relevance because of the sheer volume of tracking ordinary lives. Compare to how the Dutch Royal Library has preserved blogs (not mine I think, as I write mostly in English).