Permanence Matters

Over at Jay Rosen's PressThink blog, the Guardian's Simon Waldman has published an important essay, "The Importance of Being Permanent," in which he talks at length about why it's so important to keep links alive on the Web. Sample:

Permanence means understanding that when you put something on the Web it should be there for ever: ideally in the same place for perpetuity. It means that if I link to it now, someone else can follow that link in two days, two weeks or two years' time. (I'm not going to lay out the business models in this piece, but I'm not excluding the possibility of pay-to-view; it's the position that counts, not the price.)

This is an alien concept to many people in the news industry, which creates work designed to appear in a particular place at a particular time. But permanence is critical to understanding the real challenges and potential for online publishing.

Terrific stuff, and everyone in the news business should read it.

Comments

[jerry]

So I'm living in this hellhole known as Arizona now where for about five weeks a year there is enough snow for skiing. But for some weird reason (legal?) (grinchian?) the one big snow resort somewhat close to Phoenix doesn't have any snowplay areas for kids. NO SNOWPLAY IS ALLOWED HERE!

But humans, being fairly creative beasts, are known to work around the rules. And so there are hills that are conducive to such activities. But where are they? How are they good? How do they compare?

Well, who knows?

www.azcentral.com, the Arizona Republic's website has an article or two every year, and I have bookmarked them in my Arizona Kids' Resources folder, but the links die after about 90 days.

We're talking a good 200 word article, 1000 bytes, 1/1000 of 1/1000 of 1/100 of a $150 dollar disk drive here.

404.

NO SNOWPLAY ALLOWED HERE!

[fp]

As a blogger of some four years standing, with a continuous blog presence across three service providers for three plus of those years, I have always been conscious of link rot and do my best to prevent it. Ironically, it is professional journalism, the sources I find among the most valuable (yes NYT, I mean you) that are most contributary to link rot. Whether the information just vanishes or vanishes behind a fee for service subscription wall, the effects are the same.

[jerry]

The Arizona Daily Sun, the Flagstaff paper is no better and arguably worse. They just published an article a few days ago, Google news found it, and then it was locked behind their subscriber wall.

So me, with a couple of hundred or so tourist dollars to spend, would like to take my kids to Flagstaff to spend the weekend in the snow. So where's the SNOWPLAY? Locked behind the subscriber door.

And as for me, I'll just take my tourist dollars elsewhere.

Piss on the Arizona paper's webmasters, and the local businesses desiring my tourism dollars.

NO SNOWPLAY ALLOWED!

To get back to the topic of 404s, the Feds are no better. There is one SNOWPARK in Arizona, Cinch Hook snowpark. To find it through google, well, you can't find it directly. You can only come across it on accident by happening into the right B&B's things to do web page.

But it is managed by the Feds on Fed land, and it is currently open. (We got the last of the snow and rain wreaking havoc in California).

But though they maintain it, and police it, they just no longer mention it on their websites. They used to, but when it closed for maintenance a bit ago, they took the pages down.

They do mention Mount Lemmon, the southernmost Ski Resort in the US near Tucson.

Here's the page that google and their own pages bring up:

http://www.fs.fed.us/r3/coronado/scrd/rec/skiing/skivalley.htm

Don't bother with the click:

404.

For the feds I am not sure if it is webmaster incompetence or a result of 911. If Osama finds out about the jewel of the Coronado National forest, he'd probably get a few sleeper al qaeda mountain lions to eat the public.

NO SNOWPLAY ALLOWED!

[Josh Narins]

I have gotten into the habit of doing a "Save As..." for anything I blog. I'm lucky because I now have my own server that I can host thing at.

I haven't found a great way to handle the alternative link, since one can't cut and paste out of a title="" attribute, but, it's better than nothing.