Posted 4:43 PM by Gene

One discouraging thing about blogging for over six years to no notice is how many fads have passed me by, not least in blogging. It marks The Paper of Re-CORD's increasing impotence that it gave so much space to this story (and The One beaming) on its print front page; strangely, had I not seen a copy I would not have found it on the home page. (The tag says B1 of the New York edition, but take my word -- it was on A1 of the national edition.) Not one of these fads will inspire a successful second act. It's not clear they're even that successful; 100,000 copies would not buy John Grisham's lunch. What is worse, they leave nothing behind except bad jokes.

Moreover I mentioned a few weeks back that a story on a leading news organization's Web site not only vanished from the site, but for my quote it vanished from the Web.* God knows how much of our Internet morgue no longer exists. Certain it is that untold dead links have rendered too many of my posts incomprehensible. It isn't just the Web's problem of course; vast quantities of our media history are lost, owing to shriveled nitrate stock (silent movies) or smashed transcription discs (network radio) or trashed kinescopes and erased video tapes (network television) On the Web we have lost far more collectively and far less of worth. This does not make it any less dismaying that not only will our age come to be remembered for nothings, but there will be so little of the nothings to remember it by -- assuming anyone would want to remember it.

*As it happens I was wrong; I posted a generic URL. That story, by Michael S. Malone, is here, and still worth reading, though time has contradicted its conclusion.

P. S. See also THIS UNPRECEDENTED IDIOCY FROM THE TWXSTERS. (A definitive comment here.)