I mean, this blog's ill-maintained sidebar is a monument to that fact. To say nothing of the links in 17,000+ posts stretching back some fifteen years. Every now and again I have to go back and edit one in the archives when I get an automated Google email letting me know that the web address of a former blog or forum to which I linked in some throwaway Tuesday morning post back during the second Bush administration is now being cyber-squatted by a Kazakhstani malware ranch.
This is an ongoing, and ever-growing, problem:
"While jotting down thoughts for this edition of the newsletter, I opened up my web browser’s bookmark folder and started clicking through saved items to see which bits of the internet I loved still existed. The results were … pretty grim.That linked newsletter has some clever ideas on better preserving things you really need to preserve, and maybe realizing which links are best left to fade away...
Long, self-indulgent essays from a writer I idolized, a gorgeous online portfolio of photos taken by a photographer in Japan, a repository of old State Department language learning resources, all gone. Link rot is real, folks, and with it comes a slow, steady sloughing off things on the internet we once loved — or still love, in absentia."
.
