A day to remember information lost...

Today, 4-04-04, is the first of what will hopefully be a yearly reminder of the transience of online information. This so-called link rot is an integral part of daily internet life. But should it be?

There are many reasons to delete stuff: judicial, financial, bandwidth or storage concerns, the information that was present is no longer current, there's been a website redesign or mabye it was just plain ignorance. The number of companies (un)willingly destroying content is staggering.

An International 404 Day is a great way to raise awareness about the consequences of removing pages, images or files. All it takes is a little planning and some technical tinkering to divert people to the new information. The inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, proposed a technical solution to link and information rot, so called "robust hyperlinks" or "persistent domains". Read about those here.

International 404 Day does not look to eradicate the 404. It's part of internet life. However, with minimal effort, information that was moved can still be found.

In my original plan for launching for launching 404 Day, there was supposed be a great interactive way for you to submit 404 pages. There's no such functionality, because life (and the lack of programming skills) got it the way.

In a way, one could call this sort of symbolic.

We'll do it next year,


Lars