http://www.skoolsonline.com

Let’s face it, there’s so much rubbish on the net. Why should we want to keep it all anyway?
Many sites content have “graduated” from the web into print.

Well said nedlud.

My response to the *whole* blog post is: we cannot forget – “energy can neither be created nor be destroyed, it just takes one form from another”. If some good content is being created and posted on the web, it *will* be picked up by those (brains) to whom it is most applicable AND *will also* be retained by them in one form or another!!
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The other law that we should not forget about is: “the law of sowing and reaping”. Whatever you sow, you reap it, now or later. Whatever goes around comes around.
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Lastly, the best news is – the human has made progress in the whole process, and so has the Universe. Who is worried? Can we focus on our task at hand for today instead? “The Web Is Disappearing” – I am confident it is not. I am sorry. (Nothing personal against Josh Catone)
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Reference:
http://www.dzone.com/links/oops_there_goes_another_web_site_the_web_is_disap.html

But there is a lot of content which is far more useful, and which in the ideal world would stay accessible for a long time.

But sadly this is only too often not the case. And even with the likes of Google it can be difficult to re-find content you know you’ve found in the past, assuming it still exists.

A solution is to take control of content that is important to you by saving it to your PC. There are a several programs that do this such as the Scrapbook Firefox Extension and our product Surfulater.

Neville

PS. not talking about personal blogs, hi/bye tweets etc of course am talking about the useful information over there in the cloud

So if the problem can be broken into two components: #1 filtering out the crap and #2 preserving the data created, I’d say things like akismet, the pagerank algorithm, relying on a trusted authorities to distill info on a certain space and the discovery aspects of social bookmarking sites are helping us deal with #1 adequately. #2 has an interesting “thermostat” effect working in its favor in that people are more likely to protect valuable info so for instance, I’ve put a lot of time into writing what I believe are useful posts on my blog over the past 3 years. You can believe that I’ve taken precautions to backup the writings that I’ve labored hard to produce.
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So #2 should actually help with #1 in that the less valuable data will die off as people fail to protect it (i’ve let sites go that sucked and I’ve revived sites that went down because they’re worthy of preserving). What survives should be the cream of the crop mixed in with the inevitable spam, but hopefully our spam-fighting technology will stay one step ahead in the arms race.
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Sean

It looks bad when a link is broken – even if it is in an article I posted a couple of years earlier.

Maybe I should make a page where I can track and monitor all the external links I use…

Does anyone else think about this for their sites?

However, it really doesn’t make sense to keep a cache of everything ever created for all time. There’s a lot of garbage out there. There is, though, a mechanism for creative caching already in place. Just use bookmarking and other site recommendation services already out there to sift the wheat versus the chaff. This isn’t a 100% fool-proof, but for the most part, it would ensure that the most important information does it saved.