Can social bookmarking services prevent a bookmark from becoming dead links?

January 27, 2006 9:47 AM

Can social bookmarking services prevent a bookmark from becoming dead links?

As you can probably tell, I am new to this game.

As I understand it, bookmarking means making note of a webpage that I might want to go back to later. And this is true even before the invention of social bookmarking services such as del.icio.us .

So is there a software/invention/service out there that can prevent a webpage from disappearing or becoming a dead link once bookmarked/tagged ?

In other words, is there a software/invention/service out that that can automatically save the webpage into a hard drive somewhere once the webpage is tagged/bookmarked?

Now I am aware of wayback machine but somehow this doesn't quite cut it.

Please enlighten.

Thanks a million.

posted by studentguru to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Yahoo!'s MyWeb 2.0 can do that. (Disclaimer: I work for Yahoo!, but not directly on that product).
posted by simonw at 9:50 AM on January 27, 2006

You can copy a web site onto a local computer. I've used HTTrack with some success, though it can be a little tricky to get it to only copy what you want and not a ton of other stuff.
posted by exogenous at 9:52 AM on January 27, 2006

I recently ran across Hanzo:web, which is sort of like del.icio.us + personal wayback machine.

I've seen (at least) one program for the Mac that just archives everything you view online, all your chat sessions, etc. Aside from gobbling drive space, the idea of that is kind of creepy.
posted by adamrice at 9:57 AM on January 27, 2006

Furl saves a copy of your bookmarked page on its server. I don't think there's any service that prevents the original bookmarked page from disappearing.
posted by blue grama at 10:11 AM on January 27, 2006

Yeah, looking at the wording of the question again, the idea that you can prevent a page on a site you don't administer from disappearing is fundamentally at odds with the way the web works. There's nothing you can do at your end that will prevent me from removing or revising a page that I host.

The best you can hope for is to create an archival copy of it. Perhaps you could create an archival copy in a publicly accessible place that Google will search and rank right next to mine, so that other people can find it, so it would be almost as good as if my page never went away--of course, then you'd have to worry about copyright infringement.
posted by adamrice at 10:40 AM on January 27, 2006

Spurl as caches your bookmarks.
posted by stungeye at 11:15 AM on January 27, 2006

I don't see how social bookmarking enters into it. Any number of spiders will, with varying degrees of sophistication, archive entire websites locally.

However, if your question concerned how to prevent links from going "dead" when sites simply moved / changed names, that I could actually see social bookmarking being helpful with.
posted by NucleophilicAttack at 5:48 PM on January 27, 2006

A bookmark is just a note of the address of a website.

So what you're asking is akin to "will writing down my uncle Bob's address in my notebook prevent his house from burning down or being swept away by a landslide" and the answer is obviously "no".
posted by AmbroseChapel at 10:06 PM on January 27, 2006

Does Google index social bookmarking services? If so, maybe adding a link there makes the page slightly more likely to be put in the database, and thus slightly more likely to be cached, and thus might possibly keep some form of the site online for at least a little while after the link goes dead. In that case, I guess the answer to your question is "sort of".

If that's incorrect or unsatisfactory, I'd look to some of the other options above.
posted by SuperNova at 1:24 PM on January 28, 2006

Thank you for the answers so far.

Based on some of the answers here I have done some more research and found this article from pcmag. May be will be useful to some people here. It is a review of the following 5 services back in October 2005 :

Never Search Alone
• Introduction
• Clipmarks
• del.icio.us
• Jeteye (beta)
• Shadows (beta)
• Yahoo! My Web 2.0 (beta)

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1875207,00.asp

Clipmarks and Yahoo My Web 2.0 look interesting for saving stuff.
posted by studentguru at 3:15 PM on January 28, 2006