Well, not exactly. At least not yet. But in the brief time that I have been blogging I have seen bloggers close up shop and take down their sites. Really cool sites vanish forever. The less romantic term for this emphemerality is link rot.
I can actually sift through my own blog and see instances of rot. Pictures disappear. Site become riddled with broken links and outdated information. They are retired and then deleted. News stories transition from being free content to being part of an archive you must pay for.
And I admit there are some blogs and pages that I miss. Which is why I was psyched to find that the internet archive has something they like to call the Way Back Machine.
At points its coverage is spotty. Hey, it ain't easy trying to archive the whole internet and yes, at points it suffers from link rot as well. There are pages listed that can't be found. But where listed many of the pages exist and with their links of the time in tact and also archived. Interestingly, when I search for my old blog I find that before me, someone else, Meghan the Lizard Queen had a blog with the same url. It was entitled: "Confessions to a Certain Spongecake."
One blog dies and another is born with the same url.
Sometimes I wonder how long I will do this. And now after a whirl on the Wayback Machine I wonder what this site will be like when it is reborn after I am done.
3 comments:
time machines....it's funny, i spend large amounts of my free time trying to somehow preserve memories of things independently of my own brain--which i dont trust to actually remember stuff at all. like you say, i'm just trying to get it all down so i don't forget. im pretty terrified of forgetting all the stuff i want to remember...
Noooo you'll never go!!!
That is a pretty cool machine/archive:-)
kenyc: the forgetting is inevitable. Mabye the thing to do is make the effort to always live to the max. That way even if you can't remember any of it, you will know how you did it.
ldbug: Hopefully not. We'll see.
It's kinda neato.
Post a Comment