death to dead links
The 'Permanence' of Web Content
As much as a third of article-page traffic generated on the Webby award-winning U.K. online newspaper site, Guardian Unlimited, is from articles that are more than a month old. Speaking at the Ifra/WAN/FIPP "Beyond the Printed Word" conference in Madrid, the digital director of the Guardian Newspapers Ltd Group, Simon Waldman, again emphasized that one of the key competitive advantages that the Web as a content medium has to offer is its "permanence." An article is published online and then it is there to stay, to be accessed, recycled, re-used over and over again ideally through to infinity.Websites essentially extend the life of newspaper content. Unlike a newspaper, online articles don't end up in the dustbin or in some dusty archive, but are being constantly revisited and used -- and what could be more powerful than that? Waldman says that some newspapers that are skeptics of the Internet have failed to grasp this key advantage of "permanence" that the Web brings as a medium to a publishing operation.