every active, long-running blog is part-zombie

If you've been blogging for years, as I have (this blog was born on the Fourth of July, in 2003), then there's a 100-percent chance that your blog suffers from link rot. Bloggers are link-happy individuals; link rot is what happens when a linked-to site disappears. Someone stumbles upon an old 2004 post of yours, clicks the link in hopes of seeing a photo or news article, and is instead rewarded with a "404 Not Found" error message. It's impossible for a long-time blogger to go back through the archives and undo years of link rot: reassigning dead links is not a task that anyone looks forward to. This is also why bloggers are often tempted to violate copyright by quoting large chunks of text: they know that, eventually, link rot is going to set in, so they need to preserve the text on their own blog.

While it's often said that anything slapped onto the Net stays there forever, I'd argue that that pearl of wisdom is, at best, only partially true. Actively updated blogs are generally vivacious creatures, but as they grow ever larger, their trailing ends start to show signs of decay-- the leprous putrefaction of cyberspace. No such blog is rot-free; every such blog is part-zombie.


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