The Palmetto Withered
Fri, 11 Jan 2008
In December of 2007, one of Florida’s most popular blogs, Stuck on the Palmetto, closed up shop. I was sad to see it go.
The circumstances of this unfortunate loss are complex. One of the blog’s authors, Rick, felt that his anonymity was being threatened. An investigative journalist, Bob Norman, took offense following a post by Rick at SotP. Norman used his New Times blog, The Daily Pulp, to respond. Rick was spooked upon seeing Norman’s post. The chain of events eventually caused SotP to be shuttered and its archives deleted.
Many South Florida blogs have already given this story their attention. Print media has noted the loss. I won’t attempt an analysis of it here. Better writers than I have dissected the matter.
I want to explore a peripheral issue, that of respect for intellectual property.
Viral propagation of data is an irreversible process.
You can’t un-ring a bell, yet the most resounding note falls silent. For seven seconds, echoic memory holds an accurate facsimile of the sound for the listener to review. Then the memory is abstracted, moved out of the buffer and filed away in long-term memory. From this point what we recall is more reconstruction than accurate recording.
Memories are forgotten and lost. The same happens on the Web. Link rot is the bane of the Internet. I’ve produced online content for eleven years. Every year, I’ve seen fifteen to twenty percent of outbound links from my site go bad. Watching a blog go dark is nothing new.
I used to maintain directory pages with thousands of links. Some guy wrote, wanting me to link to his site from one of my pages. I didn’t jump right on it, so he emailed again. His tone was insulting and he complained about the broken links on my site. That same day, in response, I deleted more than a hundred directory pages.
It’s my stuff, I can do that. I was tired of chasing dead links. I was sick of negative input from people seeking to profit from my Google juice and my traffic.
Rather than spend twenty hours fixing it for an unappreciative audience, I shuttered ten years of content. Archived copies are available in various places on the web, some of which I control. Some of the best directory pages were moved to a wiki site, where other folk contribute. That content hasn’t been obliterated. I deleted it so that I could walk away from it.
As I once told the Florida Today, deleting content from the web doesn’t erase it. Every web page and RSS feed is being archived. Any number of copies could exist.
I’m one of the people keeping those archives. I built sourstock.com as a way for people to discover Florida’s blogs. An added benefit is that I can archive the RSS feeds from every site I monitor. This archive was not the primary purpose of my work, but since it allows for searching within the archived feeds, it adds tremendous value to the index.
Blogs that publish full hypertext feeds are preferable, since the search feature works better. Many blogs only provide a summary feed, giving just a taste of their content. I’m not into scraping websites: All that was archived for these blogs was the short text summary.
I repeat, sourstock.com is no site-scraper. If people want their full content to be available for syndication, they will provide a feed. I respect the wishes of content providers.
At one time, Stuck on the Palmetto provided only summaries. When the site was upgraded to the new version of Blogger, full-text feeds were made available. The archives reflected that shift.
When the Palmetto withered, I learned of the loss too late to read Rick’s last posts; He had already erased them. I mentioned my archives in the comments section of a South Florida blog, and the link was picked up by an astute blogger.
I then spent the entire evening reading the relevant posts in my archive of the Palmetto, on Bob Norman’s blog, and at several other South Florida blogs. As a result of this research, I understood and respected Rick’s desire to remain anonymous.
I considered a preemptive embargo of Rick’s content. Before I had decided, Rick wrote me, politely asking if I would take down the archive. I agreed because it was his content, and it was his right to request that I no longer publish it.
This is not something I failed to consider when I built sourstock.com. Here is what I had to say on the day I announced it:
Announcing sourstock.com, your connection to Florida blogs
[...] The content showcased on the aggregator site remains the intellectual property of its creators, and all items are linked to their original source. (If any content providers wish to be removed from the site, they may contact: dave AT spacecoastweb.org).
Still, one blogger mistakenly assumed that I didn’t have a policy for blogs deleted by their authors:
Review of Cuban-American Blogs: Who Shall Succeed SotP As South Florida’s Most Visible Blog - [in the comment section]
Manuel A.Tellechea said...
Oz:
The gentlemen at Sourstock mistakingly assumed that no blogger would be so devious as to erase completely every post and comment on his blog, as Rick did. Consequently they made the fatal error of not creating templates for each archived page. Instead, they simply linked directly to the blog; but since all those links were rendered dead by the obliteration of the site, it is impossible to retrieve their content anymore. The only use of Sourstock is that it provides an incomplete synopsis of every erased post.
I still have the information which was published, via RSS feeds, by SotP. It’s locked safely away in my database. When Rick and Alex published a summary, it was stored away. When they published a full feed, it too was archived. I had no interest in storing any comment threads, so I didn’t, (though I could easily have done so). Turning off public access to my archived copy of the Palmetto only required that a single checkbox be clicked. As administrator of the site, I can read it at my leisure.
I must protest that, (contrary to what Manuel stated), I’ve never made a fatal error. No action of mine has resulted in the death of another human being. Nor am I dead by my own carelessness, which is the common interpretation of the phrase fatal error.
As a final quibble, I object to my actions being characterized as "Orwellian" by another individual in the above-mentioned comment thread. We must be careful of these ready-made phrases. The correct use of the adjective Orwellian refers to government-sponsored censorship. It has no application in the case of an individual respecting the intellectual property rights of another.
By chance, when I caught Lt. Governor Kottkamp using a state computer to delete negative information about his past from the Florida Progressive Coalition’s wiki profile of him, the Miami Herald quoted me as saying it was "very Orwellian". This is the correct usage of the term.
I regret that local historians will find it more difficult to chronicle this unique contribution to South Florida’s public discourse. Stuck on the Palmetto is a faded memory. The only solace I can offer, to those who miss SotP, is to urge them to seek "the honey peace in old poems". (To the Stone Cutters, by Robinson Jeffers.)
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