Internet Changes Everything

Disappearing Links

Re: Blogging: Disappearing Links

This from Re: Blogging highlights a problem the web has suffered from since inception. The average lifespan of a web page is 100 days .... 100 days has no permanance at all. Internet should be a library, and we should be able to rely on links forever. This is a fundamental flaw, and frankly one of the reasons I maintain this blog for myself. I have all these links archived in my own database ... but then what if I lose interest .... hmmmm.

Electronic archivists "are playing catch-up in trying to keep documents from landing in history's dustbin," says the Washington Post, reporting, on research published in the journal Science last month, found that footnotes from scientific articles in three major journals - the New England Journal of Medicine, Science and Nature – included many Internet references that were no longer valid links, not many months after publication. "Another study, published in January, found that 40 percent to 50 percent of the URLs referenced in articles in two computing journals were inaccessible within four years," says the Post. Brewster Kahle, digital librarian at the Internet Archive in San Francisco: "It's a huge problem. The average lifespan of a Web page today is 100 days. This is no way to run a culture."

December 29, 2003 at 08:57 AM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home