Saturday, March 12, 2005

Broken News Links

One of the major benefits of the world wide web is *supposed* to be the ability to store lots and lots of information and make it easily accessible to people. Now, it's not surprising to me that individuals' and other indie websites are full of misinformation on unreliable hosts with changing domain names, etc.

But. It's disgusting to me the way huge news sites fail to understand PERMALINKS. You know, providing a link to news articles that will remain unbroken over time? I do not understand Yahoo's system of making news stories disappear, but even more I do not understand a newspaper or a news network refusing to keep each news story in one location under one name from the time it appears to . . . forever. If bandwidth and storage are too expensive, I *can* kind of understand making the archives for subscriber's only. But just deleting them or moving them somewhere unlocatable is fucking MADDENING.

What exactly is the purpose? Are they trying to make you search around so that you'll see more of their advertisers' banners? I don't fucking get it. These people are fucking clueless about the way the internet works (and how it should work in its ideal state). What a bunch of morons -- thanks for the "news", fuckers!

This is particularly annoying to me on my blog, Domestic Terrorism, which links to sick crime stories news articles. What is the point of blogging if your archives are full of broken links? Or, more specifically, what is the point of PROVIDING a link to another (commercial) site that refuses to respect the traffic you send and makes all of your archives empty of content and worthless? What is the point of respecting copyright when the only option you really have is to duplicate the article in its entirity lest you risk NEVER BEING ABLE TO FIND YOUR SOURCE MATERIAL AGAIN??

I hate these stupid pricks and their stupid news. Thanks for the memories, assholes. It's amazing to me that giant corporations are so fucking ignorant and/or disrespectful of their audiences.

No comments: