Bit Rot - Do We Got?

Thoughts about today's keynote: Bit rot - digitized information is subject to decay over time and as transported through different channels and media. It also occurs when information stored over periods of time can no longer be accessed because the storage device is outmoded or the program code that was used to translate the information is no longer supported by current programming. It was suggested that the answer may be in moving ideas and information into "the cloud" and using open source software code to encode - therefore avoiding the potential problem of getting access to the code at a time when the owner is no longer licensing access but is also not willing to give freely. Another problem that could be potentially solved by moving toward cloud computing would be the problem of bandwidth access - more options and openness could create a more competitive atmosphere for access providers. (Personally I have my doubts about this - I don't see the playing field leveling for poorer folk through the agency of phone and cable companies). The idea that the access market is not as robust as it could be is certainly very solid. Another concern is the lack of real privacy on the web coupled with the expectation of anoyminity - there is a lot of monitoring going on to protect us from virus problems etc but it is still monitoring. We should be working on this even as we move forward into more open source platforms and more social networking tools.
GoogleWave software will create a future environment that uses one preferred comunication form which the user configures (like a blog dashboard?) as a conduit for any type of communication tool that friends/followers/co-workers etc use - so there would be one picture for all the rss, twitter, email, blogs a user works with and a way to translate anything they want to reply with as any other form of communication.