Screw ‘netiquette’! Putting weblinks in blog posts is a waste of effort

This weekend, I wasted several hours removing broken weblinks from my articles on Tech-media-tainment. Most of the dead weblinks were originally to news articles. But now they lead to 404 error pages.
It’s always been good netiquette (internet etiquette) to provide links to articles you are discussing. It gives readers additional context and resources to get more information on a subject.
But after my most recent purge of bad weblinks, I’ve decided to limit when I provide them in the future. I’ll provide enough information for readers to do an internet search but not use hypertext coding. That means citing the publication, headline and date of a story, but not a weblink. Over the years too many weblinks become unusable.
Having too many broken links on a website is bad for the user experience and can negatively affect a website’s search ranking. A high number of broken links signals to search engines that your website is not well-maintained, and it can hinder how search engines crawl and index your pages.
My latest search for broken links using BrokenLinkCheck.com flagged 564 bad weblinks.
Some I couldn’t fix because they involved embedded Twitter/X or Instagram posts. A lot of celebrities appear to have deleted their Twitter accounts, for instance.
However, the link checker probably undercounted the number of useless links because many links I manually deleted had automatically redirected to publisher homepages.
The link rot problem was worse on the older blog pages, which makes sense. I’ve been posting to Tech-media-tainment since November 2008.
In some older posts where I had linked to numerous news articles, I had to delete most of the links because they didn’t work anymore.
In some links that did work, the articles were missing media such as photos, slideshows and video.
Some offenders who broke the weblinks on their end included the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), World Health Organization, Creative Commons and the CES trade show.
Repeat offenders among publishers included Bloomberg Businessweek, Entertainment Weekly, Gizmodo, GQ, Mental Floss and The Onion.
Some interesting smaller websites that I had highlighted years ago have been taken over by spam sites or gambling websites. Others just said that their URL was for sale.
I wish the Blogger platform, which Tech-media-tainment uses, would include a built-in broken link checker and a simple way to remove bad weblinks. That sounds like something that artificial intelligence would be great for.
However, as I’ve written previously, Google doesn’t seem interested in investing in Blogger these days.

Related articles:

Online content not safe from deletion (March 4, 2025)

Google has let its Blogger platform wane, but at least it’s still free (March 2, 2025)

Google search algorithm changes hurting small publishers (March 1, 2025)

Content on the internet has an expiration date (Feb. 23, 2025)

The internet is awash in broken links (Oct. 1, 2024)

Photo: ERR 404 license plate in Australia. (Photo via Creative Commons from Flickr user Michael Coghlan.)

Online content not safe from deletion

When I was starting out in the news business and worked at daily newspapers, older articles were available in bound copies of newspaper editions.
Much older articles were saved to microfilm or microfiche. You had to use special machines to read the miniaturized reproductions and to make photocopies.
There was no computer text search so you had to know the date or approximate date of the article or event to find what you needed.
The good news was that there was a permanent record of what had been reported on and written about.
Many journalists, including myself, kept physical “clips” of the articles from the newspapers and print publications that they worked for.
The rise of the internet brought with it the wonders of computer-aided search. All was good until databases like news website archives started going offline. That has led to the scourge of broken weblinks and unavailable information.
Solutions for the problem include archiving organizations such as the venerable Internet Archive. Others include Archive.Today, Archive Team and Webrecorder. But content owners must take advantage of those services.
And those are just Band-Aid fixes to a bigger problem.

Photo: Pew Internet Research chart from Chartr.

Related articles:

How to disappear completely. The internet is forever. But also, it isn’t. What happens to our culture when websites start to vanish at random? (The Verge; Dec. 18, 2024)

The internet is littered with ‘dead links’ (Fast Company; May 28, 2024)

Spotify’s layoffs put an end to a musical encyclopedia, and fans are pissed (TechCrunch; Feb. 12, 2024)

CNET Deletes Thousands of Old Articles to Game Google Search (Gizmodo; Aug. 9, 2023)

Spotify is shutting down Heardle, the Wordle-like music guessing game it bought last year (TechCrunch; April 14, 2023)

Google has let its Blogger platform wane, but at least it’s still free

I started Tech-media-tainment on Google’s Blogger platform at the tail end of the blogging craze in late 2008. Blogger offered the best-available free platform for anyone to create a blog on any subject.
I’m still happy with Blogger after all these years, but it clearly is a low priority for Google now. Google hasn’t changed Blogger much in that time, but it has become less functional over that period. I can’t do things on Blogger that I used to be able to, such as edit a post from that post’s published page or place photos within body text just by putting my cursor where I wanted the photo to go.
But it still does the job I need it to do and it’s still free. I wouldn’t blog if I had to pay to do it.
In fact, Google used to pay me through an ad-sharing arrangement by having AdSense on Tech-media-tainment. Between 2012 and 2016, I received a check whenever my share of ad revenue topped $100. In all, I received five checks.
But after I wrote a few blog posts looking at the public figures that the porn industry liked to parody in their videos, Tech-media-tainment was de-monetized. My blog didn’t feature actual pornography but the subject matter apparently violated the rules for AdSense. So that relationship ended.
Blogging was still cool when I started Tech-media-tainment but it was soon replaced in the zeitgeist as creators moved to social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and others. Many creators soon became social media influencers.
Back when I started Tech-media-tainment, Blogger used to spotlight interesting blogs on the service. But it ended the Blogs of Note column around 2011.
I’m just happy that Blogger is still operating. It helps to have a wealthy conglomerate like Alphabet backing it. I had previously tried free blogging services GeoCities, Xoom and Soup.io, but they all went out of business. Lots of bloggers moved to WordPress, but that costs money.

Photo: Blogger start page.

Google search algorithm changes hurting small publishers

As Google continues to exert significant control over what web surfers see, publishers big and small have had to become experts in search engine optimization (SEO) to ensure that their content gets discovered and shown. But that’s become a losing battle.
Continual changes to the Google search algorithm have shifted which publishers benefit and which are left out.
Lately I’ve seen a lot of smaller websites complain that recent Google algorithm changes have led to a big drop in traffic to their websites.
Some have called it quits, like entertainment news sites Giant Freakin Robot and Quiet Earth and Apple news website iMore.
Giant Freakin Robot said its internet traffic went from more than 20 million unique visitors a month to just a few thousand a month because of changes to Google search.
“Nearly every independently owned entertainment news publisher is in the same situation, in one way or another,” website founder Joshua Tyler wrote in a Nov. 4 post. “Hundreds of independent publishers have shuttered in the last two years, and thousands more are on the way.”
Another worthwhile entertainment news site that has been negatively impacted by Google’s algorithm changes is The TV Answerman, run by Phillip Swan. The website has lost 90% of its traffic and revenue due to Google’s abrupt and dramatic change to its search algorithms, Swann said in an Oct. 11 blog post.
I understand why Google changes its search algorithm. It wants to weed out bad actors from gaming its search engine. But it doesn’t appear to be working very well. Content from legitimate publishers has been buried and spam content from other sites is being promoted.
Plus, Google is favoring some large publishers because they have legal teams that can fight it or can sign business deals with the search giant.
This is not the open internet we were promised.

Photos: Cover of “Internet: A First Discovery Book” by Scholastic (2000), top;
Poster using the book’s cover as seen in 2008. (Photo by Leslie Lindballe via Creative Commons.)

Content on the internet has an expiration date

It’s been an unfortunate truism that nothing is permanent on the internet. This is a shame for anyone who values information and entertainment on the web.
The examples of disappearing content come regularly. Often websites disappear with nary a peep. Other times content like news articles simply becomes unavailable.
I occasionally try to eliminate the dead weblinks from Tech-media-tainment but it’s a Sisyphean task. It makes me not want to use weblinks on my blog at all.
Since I started Tech-media-tainment in late 2008, I’ve spotlighted more than 400 websites that I’ve found worthwhile. Quite a few of those don’t exist anymore. Some now lead to error pages. Others have been taken over by spam and marketing sites. Others are no longer updated, but at least the data is still there, so that’s good.
My list of favorite websites provides a good testing ground for the life of content on the internet.
Of the first 100 websites I highlighted between November 2008 and October 2011, 36% are no longer reachable.
Of the next 100 websites, 34% are gone. Those websites were spotlighted between October 2011 and February 2014.
Of the subsequent 100 websites, 33% are kaput. Those were publicized between February 2014 and November 2017.
Of the websites I’ve called out since then, 11 have gone bye-bye.
All told, that’s 114 websites, social media accounts and other interesting internet sites that web surfers can no longer visit.

Photo: Expiration date on cream cheese by Flickr user Chris Waits via the Creative Commons.

Favorite websites in review, part 17

This is the latest roundup of websites spotlighted on Tech-media-tainment.

396. Web3 Is Going Just Great (web3isgoinggreat.com)
397. Libs of TikTok (allmylinks.com/libsoftiktok)
398. National Day Calendar (nationaldaycalendar.com)
399. Missing Movies (missingmovies.org)
400. Letterboxd (letterboxd.com)
401. Kanopy (kanopy.com)
402. FakeIndians (ancestorstealing.blogspot.com)
403. History vs. Hollywood (historyvshollywood.com)
404. Bloody Disgusting (bloody-disgusting.com)
405. Fangoria (fangoria.com)
406. Make My Drive Fun (makemydrivefun.com)
407. AllTrails (alltrails.com)
408. Viral Post Generator (viralpostgenerator.taplio.com)
409. Statista (statista.com)
410. Chartr (chartr.co)
411. Connections (nytimes.com/games/connections)
412. Theatre of Authenticity (natachademahieu.com/portfolio/G0000YBICEpl8j10)
413. The Atlas of Beauty (theatlasofbeauty.com)
414. America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy (facebook.com/groups/340049826193416)
415. The Babylon Bee (twitter.com/TheBabylonBee)
416. End Wokeness (twitter.com/EndWokeness)
417. Wokely Correct Comics (twitter.com/WokelyCorrect)
418. Defiant L’s (twitter.com/DefiantLs)
419. Backloggd (backloggd.com)
420. Serialzd (serializd.com)
421. Untapped (untappd.com)
422. Merlin Bird ID (merlin.allaboutbirds.org)
423. Failure Museum (failure.museum)
424. The Dor Brothers (thedorbrothers.com)
425. Trudeau is a Clown: AI Generator (trudeauisaclown.com)

Photo: Portraits from The Atlas of Beauty website.

Failure Museum, Snicker Cat and other interesting websites

Occasionally I like to spotlight websites and social media accounts that I’ve found to be fun or informative.
I do this partly to take a snapshot of things I find interesting and entertaining. I also like to check back on these sites later to see how the web decays over time because many of the websites I’ve written about have disappeared over the years.
Without further ado, here is my latest batch of favorite websites:

Failure Museum

Sean Jacobsohn runs a website called Failure Museum that spotlights memorabilia from failed companies like Enron, FTX, MoviePass, Napster, Pets.com and Webvan. The website also features failed products like Jarts lawn darts and New Coke.

The Dor Brothers

The Dor Brothers run an AI video production company for commercials, music videos and brands. They’ve also made some crazy deep-fake viral videos, such as ones that depict world leaders like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin as modern urban gangsters.
I’ve mostly seen work of the Dor Brothers shared on social platform X, formerly Twitter.

The Drill

Song: T-Pain by @PeteandBas

Created using @Hailuo_AI and @krea_ai @elonmusk @stillgray @TonyHinchcliffe @tunguz @cb_doge @DefiantLs @nelkboys @TheFigen_ @FearedBuck @realDonaldTrump @DonaldJTrumpJr @jordanbpeterson @charliekirk11 pic.twitter.com/GELtzZ8X2q

— The Dor Brothers (@thedorbrothers) November 19, 2024

AI is out of control. pic.twitter.com/SdsHSgBQbD

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) August 22, 2024

Trudeau is a Clown: AI Generator

The website Trudeau is a Clown: AI Generator allows visitors to create images of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a circus clown. The unpopular Canadian politician announced Jan. 6 that he will resign once a new leader is chosen.

GooBing Detroit

The website GooBing Detroit shows the decline of residential neighborhoods in Detroit using archived images from Google Street View. It hasn’t been updated in a few years, but I doubt much has changed in the Motor City. (See article by the Daily Mail.)

AARoads

A group of Wikipedia editors started a website that’s all about U.S. roads and highways called AARoads.
The goal of AARoads is to provide comprehensive coverage of roads across the United States, including detailed descriptions and photos. (See article by Gizmodo.)

Tourons Of Yellowstone

Tourons Of Yellowstone is a funny yet alarming Instagram account documenting the stupid things tourists do at Yellowstone National Park and surrounds, such as Grand Teton National Park. “Tourist + Moron = Touron,” the account says. (See article by the Daily Mail.)

Snicker Cat

Snicker Cat is another entertaining Instagram account. The creator of the account uses videos of outrageous driving and then edits them to reveal that the car is being driven by a cool cat named Snicker Cat, aka the “Best driver in the world.”

Steve Inman: Non-Essential Commentary

Mixed martial arts and sports commentator Steve Inman narrates videos of thugs getting their comeuppance and people doing stupid stuff for comic effect. It’s a hoot. The videos are available on social media platform X, formerly Twitter, as Steve Inman: Non-Essential Commentary.

Non-essential Commentary
Highlights pic.twitter.com/hafDhX8xv9

— Steve Inman (@SteveInmanUIC) February 17, 2025

Influencers in the Wild

Influencers in the Wild is a TikTok channels that shows the efforts that social media creators go through to make their short videos of them exploring nice places and living the good life. These folks are annoying. (See article by the Independent.)

@influencersinthewild In other news… more influencers #fyp #influencer ♬ Vogue (Edit) - Madonna

Passenger Shaming

Speaking of annoying, how about those airplane passengers who do disgusting and disrespectful things and tick off other people onboard? There’s a great Instagram account for making them public called Passenger Shaming.

Mugshawtys

Mugshawtys is an Instagram account that posts mug shots of attractive women who were arrested and booked by police. There’s also a companion X account.

Rev. Ray Cistman

Finally, Rev. Ray Cistman is a parody account on X that makes fun of the racist antiracist movement. The reverend describes himself as an “anti-racist anti-white black activist.”

I better not see any white women culturally appropriating Beyonce’s new look. pic.twitter.com/hbsCduJO3f

— Rev. Ray Cistman ✊🏾🙏🏾 (@RevRayCistman) February 11, 2025

White people will see this pic and still claim Black men are absent fathers. pic.twitter.com/Qg7P1dRCoJ

— Rev. Ray Cistman ✊🏾🙏🏾 (@RevRayCistman) January 18, 2025

The 2025 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominations ballot is ridiculous

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame issued its annual slate of nominees on Feb. 12. This year’s ballot includes 14 artists, which I find ridiculous. To me, this seems like a reasonable number for an induction class.
Last year’s ballot included 15 artists. And the hall ended up inducting 16 people and groups, when including special categories. However, one of those was a music industry executive.
I get that the Rock Hall is stingy about inductions because it also has to think about producing an induction ceremony. But the hall also has an epic backlog of worthy artists to induct.
The recent Grammy Awards handed out prizes in 94 categories. The broadcast lasted for three-and-a-half hours, though most awards were presented off camera.
Everyone on the 2025 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ballot arguably deserves to be enshrined in the hall. The nominees include: Bad Company, The Black Crowes, Mariah Carey, Chubby Checker, Joe Cocker, Billy Idol, Joy Division/New Order, Cyndi Lauper, Maná, Oasis, Outkast, Phish, Soundgarden and The White Stripes.
Fans are able to provide their input by voting online and can choose up to seven artists. I chose Bad Company, Mariah Carey, Billy Idol, Joy Division/New Order, Cyndi Lauper, Soundgarden and The White Stripes.
Those are my choices for the “performer” category of inductees. I think Chubby Checker should get in as a “musical influence” inductee and Joe Cocker is a cinch for the “musical excellence” category.
I think future Rock Hall ballots should have a minimum of 20 artists to consider. Let’s get some more names in the conversation.
Consider that the Baseball Hall of Fame nominee list this year included 28 players under consideration. But only three got enough votes from the Baseball Writers’ Association of America to be inducted.

Wild mammals in my Northern Virginia backyard

One of the perks of living next to Fairfax County, Va., park land is that there’s an abundance of wildlife that lives there and will venture into my neighborhood.
I’ve spent the last week posting about all the bird life in my area. Now, let’s cover the mammals I see in my backyard.
I’ve taken photos of white-tailed deer and red fox in my yard. My Birdfy camera-equipped bird feeder has been visited by Eastern gray squirrels and mice.
And last Thanksgiving, I threw the carcass of our turkey in the backyard to see what creatures would come to eat it. It attracted some ravenous foxes and raccoons who picked it clean. I captured the photos with my Stealth Cam motion-activated camera.

Eastern gray squirrel

Mice

Red fox

Raccoon

Birds of Northern Virginia: Hawks, owls, herons and woodpeckers

My interest in the birds of Northern Virginia expands beyond my bird feeder. I’ve taken photos in my yard of a barred owl, red-shouldered hawk and pileated woodpecker.
My suet feeder attracts the downy woodpecker, but I don’t have any good photos to share.
In my neighborhood and park walks, I’ve seen the great blue heron, mallard ducks and tons of Canada geese (which are a messy nuisance). I’ve seen robins, crows and vultures as well.

Pileated woodpecker

Red-shouldered hawk

Great blue heron

Mallard ducks

Birds of Northern Virginia: catbirds, cowbirds, doves and jays

This is my fourth and last post on the birds that show up to my camera-equipped bird feeder.
These are among the more unusual visitors I’ve gotten. They include the blue jay, brown-headed cowbird, gray catbird and mourning dove.

Blue jay

Brown-headed cowbird

Gray catbird

Mourning dove

Related articles:

Blue jay

Brown-headed cowbird

Gray catbird

Mourning dove