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The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

lil.law.harvard.edu

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Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

#101

Post by schiffern »

>Of the 2,816 links that embedded on the page (accounting for a total of 999,400 pixels), 547 are entirely unreachable at this time. A further 489 redirect to a different domain or to a domain resale portal, leaving 1,780 reachable links

Looking at the million dollar homepage, many of the links were never valid:

http://paid & reserved/

http:// paid and reserved - accent designer clothing/

http://reserved for edna moran/

http://paid & reserved for paul tarquinio/ (1200 pixels)

http://pending order/

These links are all shown in plain red ("link to unreachable or entirely empty pages") in the "visualization of link rot," so it looks like the authors didn't account for invalid URLs.

Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

#104

Post by flashmob »

sixQuarks wrote: post #54

I actually purchased a $300 spot on this. I did get quite a few clicks, but very low-quality traffic. Mostly, I got lots of offers from copycat sites to join their "billion dollar" homepage or whatnot. It's crazy how many copycats came out, very unoriginal thinking going on.

I too bought, about $800, at the bottom right, to place the words "Million Dollar Script". The script cost $50 a pop, and allowed you to make a self-hosted copycat site.

I was quite busy for the next few months as orders kept rushing in!

I've also had a few competitors pop up & the script was pirated, including some selling it on ebay, they even forgot to remove my contact email, so their customers were coming to me for support.

Eventually, the fad died down, but it got a lot of business out of those 800 pixels.

Thanks Alex, if you're reading this, for the original idea & letting my ad on your site.

Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

#105

Post by raattgift »

pishpash wrote: post #53

Whatever happened to DOI? (Or leveraging Google's knowledge of redirects?) A lot of rot is hosting changes; the documents, if the author cared, could well be hosted somewhere else.

DOI is still there; in fact one might say that it's sci-hub and not google that has made DOI actually useful.

Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

#106

Post by concede_pluto »

gscott wrote: post #68
krallja wrote: post #2

The Million Dollar Homepage is not decaying (it is still serving its million dollar purpose) - it is the Web itself that has decayed. The brittleness of URIs is on full display. "Cool URLs don't change," but most of these URLs were never cool: they had to rent coolness from Internet cool kid Alex Tew.

Same as if I drive down a street ten years later... I can't expect the street to be a time-capsule to mt memories.

Old buildings stand until they decay or we run out of space nearby and demolish them. HTML doesn't decay and we can't run out of URLs; web pages only disappear because our hosting infrastructure needlessly demands ongoing payment from (only!) the author.

I say "needlessly" because the actual cost of storage, CPU, and networks are dropping so quickly that hosting a page forever should asymptotically approach a fixed cost that isn't much more than the first few years.

Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

#108

Post by StavrosK »

scrollaway wrote: post #98
StavrosK wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was. Just not Silicon Valley the show.

I had the same reaction when I saw the blood-boy thing going on last season. Then I found out where the idea came from...

Oh God, is that a thing that actually happens in the real SV too? I thought the show made that up.

Re: The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact

#110

Post by concede_pluto »

ernsheong wrote: post #17

FWIW, I'm building https://PageDash.com as a private web archive to address the problem of link rot, beginning from a personal level. Launching in late August. Think of it as a private version of perma.cc.

perma.cc? Wow. Thank you for not trying to establish a permanent namespace in a vanity ccTLD with a tenuous relationship to some privately-held company.
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