I have to say, a service I would love would be a website that mirrors content but only if the original source went down, and otherwise redirects to the original site. Imagine something like a URL shortener, but the URL it gives you will redirect to a cached copy of the original page in the event that the original page disappears. That way, you can link and give credit to the people who made the content, but if something happens it isn't lost from the internet for good. It would, in a sense, be a "permanent URL" service. It'd be great for citations too, e.g. wikipedia, academia, etc. I'm not sure if that's what the OP is getting at here, or if he's suggesting something else?
Either way, too bad rights issues would probably stop something like that ever being made.
As you say, rights issues would probably stop something like this, and I have a few stories that show two sides of the rights issues.
1) Back in 1998, the company hosting my website received a cease and desist letter from a company that held the "Welcome Wagon(TM)" trademark because of a page I had on my website. That prompted me to get my own domain and move the content over (and I was able to get proper redirects installed on the company webserver). I was happy (I had my own domain, a ".org" and apparently, that was enough to keep the lawyers at bay). The hosting company was happy (they didn't have to deal with the cease and desist letter) and the trademark holding company was happy (they protected their trademark like they're legally required to). I'm sure that the trademark company would be upset if their trademark was still "in use" at [redacted].com (the hosting company, long gone by now).
2) I hosted a friend's blog on my server. A few months later he asked me to take the blog down, for both personal and possibly legal reasons (he was afraid of litigation from his employer, who had a known history of suing employees, but that's not my story to tell). I'm sure he would be upset (and potentially a lot poorer) had his content remained online for all to see.
3) I've received two requests to remove information on my blog. The first time (http://boston.conman.org/2001/08/22.2) someone didn't quite grasp the concept that domain name registration information is public, but I didn't feel like fighting someone who's grasp of English wasn't that great to begin with, and removed the information. The second time (http://boston.conman.org/2001/11/30.1) was due to a mistake, so I blacked out identifying information. I didn't want to remove the page, because, you know, cool URLs don't change (http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html); yet the incident was a mistake. There's no real point in seeing the non-redacted version, nor do I really want people to see the non-redacted version.
There are a ton of corner-cases like these to contend with. Just one reason why Ted Nelson's version of hypertext never got off the ground.
Does anyone know the current status of this effort? I love the idea, but the mailing list has no activity and I didn't see any evidence that w3id URLs are currently usable.
I really like your idea, but what about content being changed/updated, instead of deleted?
For some use cases it would make sense to show the cache (when the original quote is no longer there), while for other it'd make sense to forward (some style update, or an important addition).
- Allow someone to manually view the cached version at any time if they wanted to.
- Show a splash page giving the user to view the original or the new version (complete with a diff highlighting changes?)
- Code some heuristics, similar to Instapaper and the like: if the content of the page changes, display the cached version, but if it's just the layout that changes then display the new version. Or look for dates on blog posts, or words like "Updated: " or similar.
- Give the website owners control: let them submit their site to be linked against, and give them some metadata tag that they can use to flag updates. This sidesteps the rights issues too (the website owner gives permission) and it could also be used as a CDN essentially, or a backup in case of server failure, or if the website is hosted in an unfriendly country etc.
I think it's definitely doable in theory at least.
It occurs to me--this is exactly what http://semver.org/ is for! Content changes are new "major versions"; edits are "minor versions"; errata are "bugfixes." You could link to a page @14.1.2, or @14.x, or @latest.
I think you can achieve that effect with auto-scaling, for example on Elastic Beanstalk. If AWS goes down though, that won't help (but most probably such a service would run on AWS anyway :)).
I have to say, a service I would love would be a website that mirrors content but only if the original source went down, and otherwise redirects to the original site. Imagine something like a URL shortener, but the URL it gives you will redirect to a cached copy of the original page in the event that the original page disappears. That way, you can link and give credit to the people who made the content, but if something happens it isn't lost from the internet for good. It would, in a sense, be a "permanent URL" service. It'd be great for citations too, e.g. wikipedia, academia, etc. I'm not sure if that's what the OP is getting at here, or if he's suggesting something else?
Either way, too bad rights issues would probably stop something like that ever being made.