We are the first generation of ordinary individuals who will leave behind a multi-dimensional digital record of what we did, beginning when the net changed the world.

You must read “Raiding Eternity” by Joel Johnson, a melancholy, insightful tale about the way the Internet amplifies individual human persistence more than ever before. If it’s not ‘us’ at least it is digital ripples of what we were.
(via daring fireball)

German over at java.dzone.com has a great article on db4o, a persistence engine that will make life easier for Java developers by giving them a middle ground option for dealing with data persistence, instead of relational databases with ORM tools, which are time-consuming, or serialization, which in Java is not straightforward for object persistence.