What the Olde Links Say About Domains — CogDogBlog

Shouldn’t the idea of publishing on the web mean generating something that can “echo all around the world”? Once again, my experience shows that if you publish something on an employer’s web site, or a company’s web site, or even in something that just takes away the work of managing web sites, the chances of…

What the Olde Links Say About Domains — CogDogBlog

Alan Levine ladies and gentleman (the Linklover himself), pointing out the fact that if you don’t preserve something yourself on the web, then WHO is going to preserve it? If you hope, wish, the Inter Wayback Machine will be your only hope, that may come true. But that’s no guarantee either, over time. Which reminds me, a funny thing about end notes, even in real book publishing. I started/stopped multiple times reading through Sheryl Sandberg’s book “Lean In” after hearing about from her co-author Nell Scovell. That’s a whole other book, story, anecdote. So I thought you know I just read this auto-biography from Nell Scovell and she’s really good, so maybe I should ALSO read the book she helped Sheryl Sandberg wtih. So I did, and dear reader, that book is chock full of Sociological references and academic citations par excellence. Everything is documented, backed-up and fact checked by real Stanford U. folks who made certain her book was a slam dunk in it’s thesis and claims. However, reading through all those end notes it occurs to today, just as I finished it, almost HALF of the citations were themselves effing URLs,… The other half fully MLA/ReWorks style print/journal publications. So even as I write this I think about the link rot to every video, anecdotal recollection and random weblink tossed in for completeness. How long before before someone even as famous as Sheryl Sandberg’s magnum opus begins to tatter and fray in the end notes? It will happen.

When I first started blogging, it was on the old Userland Frontier website created and hosted for “free” by Userland software (a product of super-genius, Dave Winer). The reason why I chose that platform? Same as most people I guess. I read about in the pages and online editions of Byte Magazine, as Jon Udell began plumbing the depths of RSS, and the River of News, long before algorithmic curation of wall-gardens we call Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Twitter. Those were the days, weren’t they? But now we still can do it, just using different tools, and hosted on personal domains. And that’s key, your domain, your stuff, your responsibility. It’s the self-sufficiency and freedom we hear being paid lip-service in pop-culture political circles, and pundit channels on social media. ONLY, it’s actually true, and we benefit directly from the fact we have the agency, autonomy, and means to own our little section of land out there on the Interwebs. Nobody can grief me, swat me, take it away or hold it hostage. As long as I keep paying my domain registrar, it’s mine. It belongs to me. But occupancy isn’t the same as ownership, and that’s where Alan’s admonition about link rot comes in. Whatever you do, invest the time and keep painting, sanding, weeding and re-linking those old resources you treasured. Find them, site-suck them and host them locally if need be.