The Persistence of Ephemera

Anyone who's cringed at their own intemperate mid-90s Usenet rants preserved for all eternity via Google Groups knows all about this: how conversational and interactive forms that once felt ephemeral -- or that we continue to want to believe are ephemeral, like IM -- are more and more often recorded and can be retrieved, reviewed, etc. long past the context of their original utterance.

What you may not have known is that there's an Eighth Annual Workshop and Minitrack on Persistent Conversation during the Hawai'i International Conference on Systems Science next January. And they're calling for papers.