«60% of my fav links from 10 yrs ago are 404. I wonder if Library of Congress expects 60% of their collection to go up in smoke every decade». And the discussion that follows about how to preserve not just the bits but also their meanings: twitter.com/worrydream/status/478087637…

Thanks for doing this. Hopefully, this will help reduce the problem of the Web of Alexandria that Brett Victor talked about: 60% of my fav links from 10 yrs ago are 404. I wonder if Library of Congress expects 60% of their collection to go up in smoke every decade. --- For someone who's thinking about a library in every desk, going on the web today might feel like visiting the Library of Alexandria. Things didn't work out so well with the Library of Alexandria. It's interesting that life itself chose Bush's approach. Every cell of every organism has a full copy of the genome. That works pretty well -- DNA gets damaged, cells die, organisms die, the genome lives on. It's been working pretty well for about 4 billion years. We, as a species, are currently putting together a universal repository of knowledge and ideas, unprecedented in scope and scale. Which information-handling technology should we model it on? The one that's worked for 4 billion years and is responsible for our existence? Or the one that's led to the greatest intellectual tragedies in history? twitter.com/worrydream/status/478087637… worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/

People say that, but then the truth is: twitter.com/worrydream/status/478087637… * * * Seriously, it's an interesting exercise of thought. Things are saved 'forever' once posted online, simply due to the probability of an individual/system making a copy being high enough vs. the number of viewers. But then, although all this information is archived, the vast amount of data it sinks with renders it just as anonymous as something that wouldn't have been posted in the first place. In some perspective, information posted online is there 'forever', where 'forever' means 'until it gets effectively submerged in a sea of similarly meaningless documents, lost in a maze of 404s'.