Re: Persistent URLs Considered Useful

[Jon Leonard <jleonard@divcom.umop-ap.com>]

On Thu, Jan 29, 1998 at 10:44:19AM -0800, Tim May wrote:
> At 9:47 AM -0800 1/29/98, Jim Gillogly wrote:
> 
> >BTW, I went to look this up in the Cyphernomicon (I sorta think it's
> >reffed in there), but the first 4 sites I saw on Altavista were all
> >dead-end broken links.  The Web's ripping... what's the current
> >Preferred URL?
> 
> I have no idea. Sometimes I find a site has it, sometimes not. (I'm not
> interested in keeping my tens of megs of postings on a Web page. Sosumi.)

I've copied the HTML'd version at http://www.slimy.com/crypto/cyphernomicon/.
Barring catastrope, it'll stay there until the singularity.

> The issue of "URL decay" is a very serious one, affecting directly the use
> of the Web for footnote citations, legal citations, references, etc.
> Scientific or academic articles cannot reliably cite URLs, as they are
> likely to decay or vanish or become corrupted over a matter of months, let
> alone the years or decades that a technical or academic paper is expected
> to last and be read. Call it an archivist's nightmare.

[skip to discussion of a market solution]

> A market fix might be the following:
> 
> - a site operator offers "archival" storage, perhaps/probably for a fee
> 
> - files could be placed in this archival storage for some fee for a given
> amount of time. (Given the declining cost of storage, a user might be able
> to economically buy "permanent" storage, sort of a "discounted future
> value" approach. Thus, I might pay $20 to store the Cyphernomicon for a
> year, $30 for 3 years, and $50 for "eternity."
> 
> - he may also charge digital cash for access (a separable issue, but worth
> mentioning)

Another model would be advertising supported.  In this model, a business
collects important documents, sources, and so on, and makes them generally
available.  A search engine at the site home helps index it, and provides
banner advertisements as well.

The advertisement supported model works for the search engines, and this
would have the advantage of avoiding both broken links and useless drivel.
Free access and free submission may be necessary to get both enough
documents and users to be profitable.

[snip]

> --Tim May

Jon Leonard