is there anything being done to create some persistence? i would imagine a service like this would be useful. ex. small fee (10c) to publish 10kb of unicode, available indefinitely
edit2: probably the only company i could trust to pull this off (one-time fee for publishing static content) would be amazon. it fits really well with their core business (infrastructure), and amazon is very good with long term stuff
Any single service or provider is unreliable, and what is needed is not a breadth of services (like the sort of service one or two techies seized by a HN-related enthusiasm might start running) but a depth in time of services - long-term services.
Currently, I back up URLs I care about or link on my site to ~3 places: the Internet Archive, WebCite, and my hard drive ( http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs )
I think part of the point he's making is to take matters into your own hands, rather than trusting it with a service that may very well disappear (including those that you pay for today).
edit: found this: http://www.chronicleoflife.com/ ... but i was thinking something to publish instead of simple backup
edit2: probably the only company i could trust to pull this off (one-time fee for publishing static content) would be amazon. it fits really well with their core business (infrastructure), and amazon is very good with long term stuff