Aydın Tiryaki (July 10, 2008)

The curtain falls without even a sound of applause, and everyone silently disperses.

Tens of thousands of articles by thousands of blog writers suddenly vanish into the infinite depths of the Internet.

There will surely be a farewell, but when is unknown. Will I be the first to say goodbye to Milliyet Blog, or will Milliyet Blog be the one to bid farewell to all its bloggers?

When we enter an address on the Internet, encountering a blank page—with or without notice—is a common occurrence. Let’s call this the reflection of the ruthlessness of new times on Internet pages.

I wrote about this a long time ago. I published it the day after I started writing on Milliyet Blog: “Let’s not write our articles on ice” (1):

“Now, every day, millions of new pages are being opened for use on the Internet by amateurs and professionals alike. Old pages go completely into the trash, and new pages take their place. The Internet is losing its memory.

Who among us still has the page they prepared five years ago? When we add new information to our page, we delete the old. When we look at the masthead pages of many organizations, it is impossible to find information from five years ago, such as the names of executives. Because we write the new information on the same page, the old ones disappear completely.

In 100 years, will a researcher trying to find out what was on the Internet in the year 2000 find anything?

Our newspapers, which present a significant amount of information on the Internet every day, are currently keeping their archives. If one day this newspaper closes down, how long will those archives remain accessible? If one day a stingy manager comes to the Internet publishing department of this newspaper and sacrifices the archives for the sake of freeing up new disk space, won’t all that information be a pity?”

In that article, I suggested that the National Library should be given the duty of archiving all websites in our country.

Let’s not write our articles on ice. If one day we delete what we’ve written in a fit of rage, there should be copies somewhere. If one day I say goodbye to Milliyet Blog, what I’ve written should remain there. If that place no longer exists, they should remain somewhere they are stored. If one day Milliyet Blog says goodbye to all its writers, what all the writers have written should remain; if Milliyet Blog is gone, it should remain in a national institution.

Blognote: http://www.archive.org does this on a global scale. Although it is impossible to reach every page due to format differences of web pages, it is a hope. This project should perhaps be reconsidered more systematically within the scope of United Nations World Heritage. In our country, the most suitable institution for this task is the restructured National Library.

(1) Let’s not write our articles on ice (10-15-2006): http://blog.milliyet.com.tr/Blog.aspx?BlogNo=10028

Ankara, July 09, 2008

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A Note on Methods and Tools: The original Turkish version of this work was authored entirely by the author, without any assistance from artificial intelligence. (Note: AI was utilized solely as a translation and writing assistant to prepare this English version of the original text.) This text has been prepared within the scope of the “Verbatim” project for the purpose of transferring previously published articles to the present day.