Have you read Thomas Crampton’s Reporter to NY Times Publisher: You Erased My Career? His articles were published in IHT, but after the NY Times and IHT websites merged, the archives of the IHT were deleted.
All those articles, gone. But that’s not all that disappeared…
Wikipedia Grappling with Deletion of IHT.com shows you what happens when you publish articles that link to or reference webpages that no longer exist. Yes, it means you’ll have to edit or update those pages.
Unfortunately, in the case of Wikipedia, a considerable number of pages contain links to a now non-existent site. I wonder if this will make bloggers or online publishers wary about pointing to other resources online.
I’ve gone through a number of old blog entries and see references to what are now defunct sites, or worse, are re-purposed domain names. It makes me wonder if I’ll just mention other websites in email newsletters that don’t live too long online.
Then again, nothing really lasts forever. Not even out here on the web.
