Information Durability: What are your thoughts?

[Bill French]

I've been ranting on about information durability and I'm curious if this is a subject that anyone cares about or ponders.

[Les Squires]

Two weeks ago this site -- http://nztransitiontowns.ning.com/ -- in New Zealand didn't exist. There are some existing and excellent websites and blogs. With a few sparks from key leaders nztransitiontowns has begun in two weeks to tell a more inclusive story about home and garden improvement, peak oil, global issues, etc. Local cities are joining as groups. None of the existing resources went away -- blogs are still blogging, informational sites are still informing, home-based meetings are still meetuping. The interest and momentum is sufficient to make me consider spending the next 3-4 months in New Zealand. Imagine being "face-to-face" with a whole country simultaneously!

[Bill French]

Les:

It *is* great when "stuff" can come together so easily and quickly; especially in ways never intended when the original "stuff" was created. I truly appreciate the advance in scient. ;-)

However, what happens when all this "stuff" - blogs, feeds, etc start to decay? When your social network is comprised of 200,000 information objects and 30% of the links embedded in this "stuff" are failing -

• how will you manage the scrubbing process?
• how will search engines feel about a predominance of low technical content quality?
• how will your members feel about visiting a site that has so many dead ends, missing images, and other technical issues?

The loosely coupled web has made it possible to aggregate, assimilate, integrate in so many ways. It has also made it very easy to become dependent upon information objects that may not be as persistent as the information architects might lead us to believe. Furthermore, the entire fabric of Web 2.0 and user generated content has made it possible to create trillions (back up - billions and kazillions) of dependent objects without any significant effort.

Imagine a member of this network provides a very comprehensive photo collection about some subject and hosts those images on her smugmug account. Suddenly, the user decides to file bankruptcy and lets the smugmug account expire. Just as suddenly, the value of this network would fall because there are now hundreds of missing images to go with possible hundreds (or more) posts and messages that reference these now defunt objects.

BTW - I don't have an answer to these questions, but I do admire the problem.