Unfortunately, if the user closes the account, deletes the photo, or if Flickr deletes the account because they have a rag on that day, the image will disappear and all that's left in my article is the stupid box with a message that this photo is currently unavailable:

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Originally uploaded by PlancksConstant

To prevent this problem, I store the photos on my own server so that if the user deletes his account, or removes the photo, or even if Flickr completely closes the account, the images I placed in my blog articles will persist. The only thing dead will be the credit link to the Flickr author of the photo. Here is a sample photo where I store the images on my own server.

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Photo Credit: Planck's Constant Flickr

Right-clicking and looking at properties you will note that the image is stored on my server, not Flickr's.

My readers know that many of my posts have substantial excerpts from other articles I link to. Simply writing go to X or Y for the story is a waste of time since those links will eventually rot. My articles will remain in perpetuity.

In my article Barry Chamish and the Ringworm Children Hoax, for example, there is a dead link to an article from an Israeli Newspaper which is vital to my story. Instead of leaving a dead link I was able to find a copy of the story and placed it here.

Flickr should have done what Facebook is doing now: Insuring the persistence of Internet content. The image on that server farm should have stayed there unless the author of the photo originally marked his photo private.

Unless there is persistence, I can see the day in a few years when the Internet will be near completely useless. Searches will bring up 99% dead sites, broken links, missing photos. It usually takes me 10 minutes to write an article but a few hours to research the material to see what others are saying on the subject, to get a photo, to find opposing views, etc. More than half of this time is wasted on arriving at articles that say "Oops - whatever you were looking for is not here. Perhaps it has moved. Try retyping your keywords."

Then there is the waste of time clicking on photo thumbnails only to arrive at blank screens or even messages that say "Forbidden - You don't have permission to access....jpg" or "The requested URL http:// was not found on this server."

There are millions of new blogs every year and millions of blogs disappearing. Many times I link to smaller blogs because they have something interesting to say only to see them disappear from view and I'm left with link-rot. I understand some things just cannot be saved. But certainly Flickr, Facebook, Google, et al, have the resources to keep things on servers for at least a few decades.

One of my readers mentioned the Wayback Machine but as useful as that is, the archives don't kick in until the webpage is at least 6 months old. Unfortunately, according to them, the average lifespan of a web page is 44 -75 days so the majority of content never makes it to the Internet Archive.

Hey, you don't want that article you wrote to be saved forever? Don't write it. One of the beauties of carving "I love Janet" on a tree is persistence. You can come back 50 years later and be reminded of a time in your life when you were a young man in love.

Unless some bastard cut down the tree for no good reason.

Notes

(1):

Fox News, 17 Feb 2009,Facebook Membership May Be Forever

The Consumerist blog ² noticed Sunday that the social-networking giant had quietly made a change to its user Terms of Service (TOS) on Feb. 4.

Facebook now declares that it has a perpetual license to use anything you post to your own Facebook page — even if you terminate your account.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended the change ³ as necessary in a blog posting Monday afternoon.

(2):

The Consumerist, Facebook's New Terms Of Service: "We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever."

Facebook's terms of service (TOS) used to say that when you closed an account on their network, any rights they claimed to the original content you uploaded would expire. Not anymore.

Now, anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later.* Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want.

(3):

Facebook Blog, On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information

Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they've asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn't help people share that information.

One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person's sent messages box and the other in their friend's inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.
...
People want full ownership and control of their information so they can turn off access to it at any time. At the same time, people also want to be able to bring the information others have shared with them—like email addresses, phone numbers, photos and so on—to other services and grant those services access to those people's information. These two positions are at odds with each other. There is no system today that enables me to share my email address with you and then simultaneously lets me control who you share it with and also lets you control what services you share it with.