I am sitting in a hotel with a horrible internet connection. Not only is it costly, but it is also slow and the connection seems to fall out every 2 minutes. This makes me think about how used we are to having fast and reliable connections these days. It is not that many years ago since I was connecting through a dial-up modem, which would probably have made my current connection seem like a dream. ...
The paper The Missing Link: Assessing the Reliability of Internet Citations in History Journals presents an alarming conclusion: The worldwide web has offered an increasingly common though ephemeral source of information. In research articles in two of the most highly respected history journals, 18 percent of web citations decayed within seven years of publication; 10 percent were inactive shortly after publication. Our findings are roughly consistent with those for science journals; we suspect that this problem extends to other humanities and social science publications. A means created to preserve internet sites — the Wayback Machine — made 57 percent of the missing articles in our sample available to scholars who knew about the archive. The other 43 percent of the missing links remained beyond the reach even of those searching the archive. ...
Through the blog of Gisle Martens Meyer I came across Personas by Aaron Zinman at MIT. You type in your name, and the algorithm looks around the web for information about you, creating a summary of the activities. I made one search with “Alexander Refsum Jensenius” and another with “Alexander Jensenius”, both of which turned up some interesting results. I wonder where “management”, “accident” and “sports” came from… {width=“400”}