               Tennant: Digital Libraries
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Information on the Internet That SHOULD Go AwaySeptember 18, 2009 I often worry about important and/or useful information on the Internet disappearing, like many of my colleagues. Therefore, when I run into situations where I want the information to go away, I think it's kind of funny. Let me provide an example.As someone who does just enough Unix administration and programming to be downright dangerous, I often need to find the solution to a particular problem. I sometimes even have an error message that appears to be the Holy Grail of Internet searches -- a specific phrase with unique words that will surely return only valid hits. Oh, only if that were so! Often what happens with such searches is that I get dumped into a specific post of an electronic discussion thread, that almost inevitably have the following characteristics: 1) the thread is about some other Unix distribution, thereby often rendering it useless; 2) the "answers" to the question are so opaque as to be useless; 3) the "answers" to the question are so complicated as to be crazy; 4) the thread is anywhere from two to five years old, thereby rendering it more dangerous than useless. This is the kind of information I wish would disappear: old, outdated, in many cases downright misleading or incorrect. Now to only find the algorithm for determining these characteristics and nuking this dreck off the net! Now I await your comments that point out the errors of my thesis, such as: "what about the person in Upper Downloadia who is too poor to afford enough bandwidth to download the latest system software, and needs to know how we did it back in 1998?". Fire away, I await the debate. Posted by Roy Tennant on September 18, 2009 | Comments (4)
September 18, 2009
In response to: Information on the Internet That SHOULD Go Away bt commented: Go to "Show options" in google and limit by date?
September 18, 2009
In response to: Information on the Internet That SHOULD Go Away phasefx commented: Archeologists love digging through the trash of the past. If our digital trash can survive long enough to be useful or interesting, then great!
September 22, 2009
In response to: Information on the Internet That SHOULD Go Away Jon Gorman commented: Not really going to argue, just bring up another similar problem I call the "hello world" problem. You have an issue but all you can find is a simple, ideal use of the software without any deeper details that would lead to an understanding to actually fix it. A great example is the "XSLT" introduction pages. Despite the great amount of XML with namespaces, you rarely see a good introduction to them but usually oversimplified examples.
November 4, 2009
In response to: Information on the Internet That SHOULD Go Away Eric Hellman commented: Just as a healthy forest requires periodic fires to clear away undergrowth and help seeds to germinate, the Internet needs to burn some information undergrowth. Unfortunately, we'll probably get a cataclysmic event before we get the small, healthy burn.
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