Relocating - please follow the link for new content

This archive will stay here - but you can find new posts (as well as this archive) at my new website which is at http://www.stuarteglin.com/. It's the new home for Stuart Eglin Online - including the blog, musings, and details of the publications and services which I have available. Take a look - it's worth a visit!

Tuesday, 4 October 2005

Favourites - going going gone

I spent some time last night checking through my favourites on Internet Explorer, looking to see what has happened to some of the many sites I have flagged over the last few years. It was a process that really showed me how ephemeral the internet can be. About 75% of all the links either didn't work at all, or were to temporary pages redirecting to another site. It's incredible to see how quickly things disappear on the net.

This makes it only too clear that publishing on the net doesn't necessarily mean that something is always out there. So many great sites have bitten the dust for one reason or another.

There are services set up to archive the internet - so I guess that archive pages of some of these sites will be sitting on some server somewhere - out in the deeper internet. But they are as good as lost to the casual browser.

All those billions of pages appearing and then disappearing - all that effort being wiped away in the blink of a computer screen.

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