Jakob Nielsen‘s latest Alertbox (the 200th), focuses on the victories he believes he has won over major corporations, but also on the importance of archived content. Nielsen reckons that most of his articles receive 80% of total readership once they have been archived.
This is pretty phenomenal and definitely, as he points out, support for archiving content. From the other side, however, it is also a real incentive to put dates on all your content. I use Google whenever I have a question about something. Google is fantastic, but tends to just give you the best content answering your query, rather than the newest. I’ve trawled through numerous articles and only been able to work out how old it is from the folder (eg …/archives/2001/10/) in which it resides.
As the amount of info on the web just gets bigger and bigger, this sort of basic tagging is going to be more and more important, in my opinion. Blogging has caught on, as have many (but not all) of the big news sites. Hopefully the importance of dating content as well as archiving will become obvious to all!
Comments (1) Permalink
October 19th, 2003 at 3:33 PM
I couldn’t agree more with respect to putting dates on things. A site I ran years ago had a page with a bunch of photos from a halloween party thrown by members of the community the site supported. Unfortunately, I forgot to date the page when I put it up – then when I went back to it several years later I couldn’t work out if it was in 1998 or 1999! Ever sicne then I’ve religiously written the full date (in an unambiguous style, such as “19th October 2003”) on everything I’ve posted online – even code samples where I put the date in as a comment at the top of the code.