Wednesday, October 23, 2024

Paper or Pixels: Over A Third Of Web Pages From 2013 Are No Longer Accessible

First up:

And the hat tip to Scott Hambrick: 

I built and sold a business that allowed me to retire at age 44. It was called Data Storage, Inc., information, knowledge, and records management is my jam.  

10 Years ago I gave a speech about the half life of knowledge to a bunch of MBA aspirants at a university business school.  This is the Twitter synopsis.

The half life of knowledge is the time it takes for new knowledge to either be lost, or obsolete.   We know what lost means. For knowledge to be obsolete, it loses its utility because it's irrelevant, applies to defunct systems, is found false, etc.

Knowledge of fire escape routes in a long since destroyed building, refining whale oil for lamplight, and how to drive a manual transmission all might be examples of lost knowledge.

At the time I gave the speech,  we in the data management business estimated the half life of knowledge to be 18 months. 50 years ago it was closer to 18 years.

The half life of knowledge is now probably closer to a year, maybe less.

The Lindy effect, of course, tells us that the older knowledge is the more likely it is to get older yet. The knowledge about how to cook meat isn't going away anytime soon, but the instructions that came with your Temu junk are already gone.

Most of the web that has existed has already disappeared and most of the web that exists will disappear in HALF that time.

The costs to maintain a viable web page 500 years approaches infinity.  Energy, disk space, indexing it into a growing database, format conversion for  compatibility, etc makes this not likely.  

Archive and wiki are great ideas, but their expenses are infinite and the knowledge they are entrusted with will only last as long as the institutions operating them.

What's the half life of institutions?  Shorter daily.

Our knowledge is going away....

....MUCH MORE

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