I have to agree with Duncan above. The need to continuously pay attention through fear of missing something wizzing past you. This state of flux is getting worse in my opinion.

The problem (as I see it at 12:16am) is context. The Live Web we have now is increasingly a stream of ephemera constructed to flow “content” at “consumers” who might click on ads. Too little persists. There is no sense of archival value, much less any tracing back in time. It’s all snow on the water. Fixity be damned.

So I agree that much is lost as less remains static.

But, it’s still early. I have hope. But then, I’m an optimist.

More when I’m awake and done with the book draft.

The basis for Brin & Page’s PhD work at Stanford before they left to start Google was essentially scholarly bibliometrics based on publication citation linking in an online context. In a world where the content you view and consume is ephemeral, the opportunities for referencing content (i.e., linking are diminished). Shared digital experience is lost, as is the potential for a historical publication record.

While some work has been done on this, as my organization (http://www.niso.org) has led with the Digital Object Identifier, DOI, (http://www.doi.org), the problem becomes much more challenging outside the scholarly realm, where fewer people think about or care about this question. You’ve written about something similar to this, last summer in something like “Everything online is rented”, which I’ve cited in my own writing a couple of times.

Increasingly as we move to an era when print publication is decreasing and being replaced with online-only publication, much of which is “live” so to speak, we risk entering into a historical black hole, where no one will be able to replicate your or my reading experience, possibly the entire narrative, both written and in other media.

We might not care much about it, however, there are a variety of attempts to ‘scrub’ history from the web and the opportunities to do so will only increase as there is less ‘real-world’ media and people become more aware of the opportunities. While folks like Brewster Kahle and his team at the Internet Archive are working to address this, there is a far messier world and it’s far bigger than the IA team can handle. There really needs to be more focus on this area.

Be keen on your riff on this.