Friday, September 30, 2016

Disappearing websites: No permanence on the web

Since August 2009, I’ve been writing about websites that I find interesting and worthwhile on Tech-media-tainment.
A lot of those websites are no longer accessible or their content has been taken down.
Of the 275 websites I’ve spotlighted in blog posts about my favorite websites, 34 are now gone. That’s 12% of websites I’ve listed as favorites that are now no more.
Their amusing and informative content has vanished into the digital ether.
That’s truly a shame. And it points out one of the greatest failed promises of digital content: there’s permanence on the internet. Something here today can be gone tomorrow.
I don’t know why these 34 websites disappeared. In some cases, bloggers likely didn’t want to pay the web hosting fees anymore for their low-traffic sites.
I suspect Tumblr’s onerous copyright enforcement played a part in some of those blog disappearances. That’s because a lot of the blogs that disappeared were on Tumblr and they used photos for fair use applications.
I know from personal experience that Tumblr doesn’t give a crap about fair use, so they hit the delete button.

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