MOVING THINGS AROUND IN THE WEB

I have been updating my home pages. This is something I have to do from time to time. I have perhaps 50 items posted, and the majority of them are on other websites – in which the owners have been kind enough to make space for things I have worked on. But people keep changing the URLs for these postings. That of course breaks all the links to them. This Blog entry is to fulminate against such practices.

I have been contributing to the Development Gateway Portal, seeking to develop a resource for others to help them find useful materials on the development topics that interest me. Basically, this is sharing a little of the information I have gleened over time with others. I have now posted some 3,500 resource descriptions. While I am doing this, people are moving the useful resources that I have described, indexed, and linked!

Creation of new information is admirable. I would suggest that perhaps even more important is organization and systematization of information, as well as storage of the information in ways that it can be found and utilized. The Web is a potentially great medium for this organization and dissemination of information. But not when people are moving it around.

One of the key problems in factories making complex machines, like airplanes, is keeping track of the many parts that go into each plane. If you have thousands of parts, manufactured in different places, and used at different times, you have to have huge warehouses to store them all. Keeping track of the stored parts is a big problem, one that is being attacked by having each pallet of parts record its own description, and broadcast it by wireless. But the World Wide Web is an much larger space, with a huge number of pieces of information, to be used by a huge number of people.

Moving the information from place to place is a big disservice to the community! If you are tempted, don't do it!