A thought just struck me this morning - does anyone know how many "dead" sites are actually out there on the Net. Sites which perhaps google has stopped indexing or dropped from its index. Blogs which have been left, forums which someone niavely tried to set up. None of my research can come up with an answer ot this. Can you?
This information could be very useful in a sort of what went wrong scenario - the same way as experts going looking for black boxes when an aircraft crashes to try and find out the cause.
Now that it is so easy to create a website - or be present on the net for want of a better word and a myspace account is also presence on the net as is a Twitter account and other social media sites - would it not be interesting to know the actual biography of a website from its birth to its death. The success of a website can, I believe, be measured by many criteria but one common one must be visitors. Can I call my website a success if I have zero visitors. Yes you can if you only want a website to try and create the most magnificent banners, formats etc and do not care who sees them apart from yourself. This, I assume makes up a minority of the current website owners. For bloggers and tweeters one of the main reasons for having a site is to communicate with others. This equally requires visibility. Lastly commercial websites without visitors - need I say more?
That is what I mean by cyber-archeology. Looking at these cyber ruins of the past with a view to understanding their downfall. Was it the war of the search engines in the 20th century which caused its downfall? Was it conquered and colonized by Amazon or Google in the 21 century? Questions of interest to me would be ones like how long do people try to get visibility through their websites before giving up? How long do people blog for before giving up as no one reads their blog? And lastly what is the percentage of sites on the net that basically are dead - a criteria for me would be a site which has not been updated in the past 10-12 months. Your comments would fascinate me!
This information could be very useful in a sort of what went wrong scenario - the same way as experts going looking for black boxes when an aircraft crashes to try and find out the cause.
Now that it is so easy to create a website - or be present on the net for want of a better word and a myspace account is also presence on the net as is a Twitter account and other social media sites - would it not be interesting to know the actual biography of a website from its birth to its death. The success of a website can, I believe, be measured by many criteria but one common one must be visitors. Can I call my website a success if I have zero visitors. Yes you can if you only want a website to try and create the most magnificent banners, formats etc and do not care who sees them apart from yourself. This, I assume makes up a minority of the current website owners. For bloggers and tweeters one of the main reasons for having a site is to communicate with others. This equally requires visibility. Lastly commercial websites without visitors - need I say more?
