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The Great Web Site Die-Off
May 14, 2008

I turned 50 last year, so I can perhaps be forgiven if my thoughts occasionally run to retirement, or heaven forfend, death (does anyone else read the obits just to compare ages and causes of death?). Sometimes in these thoughts I wonder about the fate of my web empire -- particularly if my exit is sudden. You see, I manage a number of web sites, although most don't require much in the way of maintenance.

First there is my personal and professional web site, the lynchpin of my empire, then there are a couple web sites I rescued from the Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE before it goes into that dark night. Add to that the web sites I manage for the Web4Lib and XML4Lib electronic discussions. Oh, and of course the Current Cites web site for the publication I edit every month. There is the site I started to help librarians and staff learn about key library technologies, and the site for the festschrift I'm editing for my mentor Anne Lipow. And of course my cafepress.com site where people can scoop up "I am a Librarian" t-shirts. And last but by no means least is my personal favorite, FreeLargePhotos.com, where I put up many of my own photos and those of other photographers I admire who have joined me.

Are you starting to get the picture? At some point I will not longer be able to, or desire to, take care of these sites. If I have planned accordingly they can live on under someone else's stewardship. This will make sense for some sites, such as the Jack London Online Collection, especially since I've already established a working relationship with an interested institution. I could also imagine people stepping in were a tragedy to befall me, to pick up the pieces for sites like Web4Lib and XML4Lib. But things get sticky pretty fast from there. Current Cites is supported by a Perl and XML infrastructure that is both code-based and hand tooled. Without a clear hand-off it would probably need to be recreated by someone interested in doing so. My more personal sites, such as the one for the festschrift, the CafePress site, TechEssence.info, and even the apple of my eye, FreeLargePhotos.com, would likely simply fall into limbo until the bill came due on my server and they were wiped off the face of the Internet.

So that's my point. I'm not alone. The boomers who have built their own web empires are approaching retirement, death, or both. What will happen to the sites they've created? Some will be taken up by others, probably, while some are ignored until they circle down into the endless 404, taking whatever content or service or purpose they had with them.

I'm fully aware of the several library projects to perform web crawling for the purposes of grabbing sites wholesale for preservation, but I'm not so full of myself to think that any of my sites clears the bar for such attention. And I'm not alone by any means. It's easy to make a case for preserving a government web site, or sites related to a particular issue or that have a clear educational purpose. It's much harder to make a case to preserve my personal web site, as enthralled with it as I may personally be.

Therefore, we will see a "Great Web Site Die-Off", of that you can be sure. What this presages or implies is less certain. Perhaps there will emerge web site rescue artists, who discover interesting sites that have died and suck the content out of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine for the potential ad revenue to be had in putting them back up on the Internet. You know, I think I may just have figured out what I'll do in retirement. I'm already making enough money from ads to more than pay for the server I rent, so why not? I'm thinking there's room in my web empire for a few more.

Posted by Roy Tennant on May 14, 2008 | Comments (2)