I quite often read above my understanding age, which is why Hapgood is in my RSS feeds. The other day I read: Connected Copies where I read this:
the future of the web involves moving away from the idea of centralized, authoritative locations and into something I call “connected copies”.
This lead me to AMBER where it says:
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society wants to keep linked content accessible.
Whether links fail because of DDoS attacks, censorship, or just plain old link rot, reliably accessing linked content is a problem for Internet users everywhere.
Having blogged for a while I am very aware of this problem, links I’ve made have fallen away. My bookmarks are full of holes.
Just the other day I linked to a couple of posts here that were made this month. They have already gone.1
I’ve installed the Amber WordPress Plugin here and set it to use the Internet Archive to ‘save links’ when I make them. I could have chosen to save them here, but I wonder if that could get messy?
The other thing that crosses my mind is what if people want to rub out something they have published. When a post is taken down deliberately, should I be archiving it? The posts I mentioned above were deleted by the author (I presume). Should I then make public copies available? That is what would have happened if I’d had the amber plugin working at the time.
I don’t know the answer to these questions or how the plugin works, but I’ll keep it running here for a while and look out for broken links.
Featured image Flickr photo Public Domain: Image from page 28 of “The effect of black rot on turnips, a series of photomicrographs, accompanied by an explanatory text” (1903) | Flickr – Photo Sharing!
Image credit: Paul Ritchie’s “Broken Web Connections? Welcome To 2009…”
I was reading John Johnston’s blog this morning (gotta keep up with my European peeps) and his post about fighting linkrot hit home. Every morning I wake up to an email letting me know a few more links on the bava have died, I pour out a little Louis and mourn the day. As of now I have 2,801 posts with 19,583 links. Of those links, 2721 are broken. That’s just about 15% of all the links on the bava lost to the anals of time. BASTARDS!!!
While I was reading John’s post about linkrot I was reminded of a conversation I had with Kin Lane and Tim Owens over a year ago about how Kin has a link archiver he programmed that preserves all the connections on his various sites by taking screenshot of links before they die. I was very jealous, because every morning I still wake up to the bava obituary of links in my inbox. So, when I read about the Berkman Center’s new tool called Amber that prevents just this kind of linkrot by taking screenshots of existing links I was fired up. What an awesome tool for them to build for folks. Inspired, I decided then and there to finally put a tourniquet on the bava link hemorrhaging. The fact that they have a WordPress plugin that allowed me to send the screenshots to an S3 bucket and the Internet Archive was that much cooler. It was dead simple to setup, and I feel like I just started down the road of preservation of my past thinking, the links to which will only get more fragile with time. Nothing like a little amber to preserve the action:
100-million-year-old spider attack captured in amber.