Today on /. there is a story Searching for Mark Pilgrim., linking to the blog post of Eric Meyer.
Just yesterday, I took a screenshot of the title page of Dive Into HTML5 to include in a presentation as a highly recommended resource. Now it’s gone. That site, along with all the other “Dive Into…†sites (Accessibility, Python, Greasemonkey, etc.) and addictionis.org, is returning an HTTP “410 Gone†message. Mark’s Github, Google+, Reddit, and Twitter accounts have all been deleted. And attempts to email him have been bounced back.
I was using Dive Into Python to learn Python. When you go to it now, you get the picture above – gone. (Thankfully there’s already a mirrored version.)
I also wonder why Mark Pilgrim decided to wipe all of his work from the web, but also the implications of infosuicide. A lot of the information sharing on the web is done with a level of trust. I trust that you won’t just delete everything and make it all disappear. I guess it’s a matter of degrees – a one off site is fleeting. A whole brand, you think that would have some permanence.
Infosuicide worries me for the long term implications for the community. I don’t like gaps, but I also don’t think we can avoid it. The Wayback machine can work, but it’s not capturing everything. And so is the ephemeral nature of the internet….
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