I can’t agree with your stance on that web content is regarded with less importance than traditional documents. If anything, I think most people are switching over to digital media now and much more conscientious about maintaining these “records” than they were years ago. It just seemed silly to claim that information is better preserved in traditional media, especially if you think back to things like the Cultural Revolution, erasing all “irrelevant” information. I’m sure the Library of Alexandra could keep every record cuz back then, people who could afford to write something down on scrolls were people worth listening to. The proportion of useful info to useless info on the web nowadays is beyond comparison to ancient Greece.

Posthumous management of web content might very well be tricky, as you say. But realistically, with domains expiring and server resources being limited, is there much more to be done than for YOU to take up the content you found relevant from your friend’s site, and publishing it on your site? How long could we keep up that chain of re-publication? Should websites become family heirlooms? Traditional media definitely has the advantage there – so if you wanna preserve content, write a book?

@Young: I have to disagree about most content surviving through iteration. While it’s true that older sites that remain unmaintained do disappear over time (and we can put some of that down to Darwinism), the issue of record keeping on the web is only going to become more profound as the Web ages. Consider this, currently, it’s fair to say that the majority of those who have been producing content for the web since it’s inception are still alive. What happens when a site author passes away? It’s not something we often like talking about but the fact remains that when a site owner who’s a respected expert in their field (posting information on a subject that doesn’t evolve as rapidly as web design), if something happened to them, what would happen to their site and it’s content? I had a friend who unfortunately passed away a year ago, and the information on their site was relevant, even too this day, but their family not knowing about it’s value simply didn’t “hand the site over” to someone else to continue, or keep it up. They took it down (the value of human insights was lost in this case).

Here’s the situation, we as a society are placing greater demands on the Web to hold all of our information (books are going digital, as are most records), and releasing this content into the wild for all to read is also a central part in society. What will happen in 100 years time, when many of us will no longer be around? Copyright exists post-death, and there’s plenty of other reasons why content disappears online, businesses going bust, ceasing services, users getting bored and not carrying on with the project. I just think we treat data so poorly these days, that we risk of not having that iterative system you speak about, but having holes in our part of the worlds evolution, and I’ve seen a number of sites I considered valuable disappear in the past few years.

PS – Interesting angle for an article, Alexander.

Best example: This is more of a hardware storage example, but is relevant to cloud computing, which is definitely part of the internet! Specifically, the lessons learned about 30 years ago regarding optimizing storage disk configurations, read vs write seek times, and avoiding disk contention affecting processor performance have become directly relevant again for spinning instances for upload to the cloud with AWS EC2 or JetS.

I like forward to reading other articles on SixRevisions that just caught my eye, on “History of Web Browsers” and “Evolution of Web Design”.