Category Archives: technology

The Statistics on Link Rot

By sampling 4,200 random URLs spanning a 14 year period,Â Maciej CegÅ‚owski, the creator ofÂ bookmarking websiteÂ, decided to gather statistics on the extent of link rot and how it progressed across time. Interested in finding out if there is some sort of ‘half life of links’, he found instead that it is a fairly linear, fast deterioration:

Links appear to die at a steady rate (they don’t have a half life), and you can expect to lose about a quarter of them every seven years.

And even that is an optimistic result, says Maciej, as not all dead links were able to be discovered programmatically.Â There are also several unanswered questions:

  • How many of these dead URLs are findable on
  • What is the attrition rate for shortened links?
  • Is there a simple programmatic way to detect parked domains?
  • Given just a URL, can we make any intelligent guesses about its vulnerability to Â link rot?

Interestingly, link rotÂ is what inspired the creation ofÂ (it features page archiving funcitonality). This is similar to why I started Lone Gunman: I was losing track of interesting links and articles, and wanted a way to easily find them again as well as help me build connections between disparate articles and topics.

Mid-90s Quotes from Wired


Some of my favourites:

Alan Kay, Wired 2.05, May 1994, p. 77

Daniel Pierehbech, Wired 2.12, Dec 1994, p. 158

Phil Petton, Wired 3.01, Jan 1995, p. 126

Scott Sassa, Wired 3.03, Mar 1995, p. 113

Nicholas Negroponte, Wired 3.09, Sep 1995, p. 206

Peter Drucker, Wired 4.08, Aug 1996, p. 118

Tom Peters, Wired 5.12, Dec 1997

Cialdini’s Principles of Persuasion and the Importance of Recognising “Enforced Compliance”

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is Robert Cialdini’s 1984 book discussing what he calls the six fundamental psychological principles of compliance: consistency, reciprocation, social proof, authority, liking and scarcity.

The conclusion to Cialdini’s book points out why, in this increasingly complex world, resisting attempts at “enforced compliance” (deception) through these key principles is as important as recognising and responding to truthful instances of their implementation:

Because technology can evolve much faster than we can, our natural capacity to process information is likely to be increasingly inadequate to handle the surfeit of change, choice, and challenge that is characteristic of modern life. More and more frequently, we will find ourselves in the position of the lower animalsâ€”with a mental apparatus that is unequipped to deal thoroughly with the intricacy and richness of the outside environment. Unlike the animals, whose cognitive powers have always been relatively deficient, we have created our own deficiency by constructing a radically more complex world. But the consequence of our new deficiency is the same as that of the animals’ long-standing one. When making a decision, we will less frequently enjoy the luxury of a fully considered analysis of the total situation but will revert increasingly to a focus on a single, usually reliable feature of it.

When those single features are truly reliable, there is nothing inherently wrong with the shortcut approach of narrowed attention and automatic response to a particular piece of information. The problem comes when something causes the normally trustworthy cues to counsel us poorly, to lead us to erroneous actions and wrongheaded decisions.

Contextual Writing (Telescopic and Responsive Text)

How can a writer cater to an audience with diverse preferences and needs (particularly, how much detail they want and how much time they have)? One way is to use telescopic or responsive text.

Telescopic text is a method of iteratively displaying more and more textual detail on requestÂ (I suppose the reader becomes theÂ user). Joe Davis’ brilliant example of telescopic text starts with the phrase “I made tea” before progressing to a 198-word short story through 45-or-so iterations. Wonderful.

Responsive text is similar in some regards and vastly different in others. Like a responsive design, responsive text ‘scales’ in response to the user’s screen size in order to display an appropriate amount of textual detail. If viewed on a larger screen,Â Frankie Roberto’s responsive text example points out:

It’s a bit of an experiment, and I’m not really sure how useful it really is, but I think it’s an interesting idea.

It could also perhaps be combined with some form of a user interface that allows you to control how much text you want to read. This might be really useful for news articles, for instance â€“ you could decide whether to read full quotes and a detailed backstory, or just the gist.

I think making this behaviour user-controllable is key and an interface variable/bookmarklet is an interesting concept to follow. One issue I envisage is that adoption of this will come from authors and making this easy-to-implement on the producer-side will take some skill.

via @foomandoonian










Update: And of course, there’s always O.P.C.