Link Rot : A question.

This is a really round about way of soliciting advice from the BNM list, who are my only friends.

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One of my friends here in NZ, is an artist, and his Dad is a sort of wizard… with a tremendous beard and fierce blue eyes. He is a learned man etc. He’s been in the family for generations.

So… one year, at the annual art-gallery Christmas event, where I bought this…

…I was chattering away to him, and told him that I was going to write a book.

“Yes”, he said… eyes infinitely scanning some invisible horizon, beyond the realms of mortal perception… “neither am I”.

That was 4 years ago.

I haven’t written a book.

What I have written though, is about 900 posts on this blog, about 500 on my other blogs, various blatherings on facebook (which is a pretend, cartoon version of me that I seem to have made up, and who I am gradually turning into) and about 22,000 tweets, each and every one a pearl of wisdom etc.

I could conceivably scrape together enough to “write a book”, but apart from kudos, why would I want to? It would be blogging-round-a-theme, but without any videos embedded, or clickable links etc. A book is a crippled blog. Maybe one day kindles or whatever will get to the point where you can embed videos, but… you can already do that with iPads etc, so why bother? A kindle is just a crippled iPad, which is (in turn) a crippled computer.

So… The Great Work is a work in progress… but the one, really big problem with it is… link rot.

One of the primary traits of the era we’re currently living in is boundary-dissolution. “A Book” is a clump of information with a very clearly delineated boundary. A blog isn’t. A blog has links and embeds and comments and pingbacks etc… a blog has context outside itself. A blog exists outside itself.

And the trouble with that is that the links and embeds go away. If this is The Great Work… we’re fucking it up, because we’re not backing up context. You can back up your images, back up your database… but your links will mean nothing, and your video-embeds won’t work.

So here’s the question:

Is there a thing (ideally a wordpress plugin) that can be used to scan a blog page, and screen-grab linked pages, and download, and store locally, youtube (etc) videos?

Maybe automatically show the backed up versions when the originals die?

Because otherwise most of us are writing stuff that will be, by the end of the decade, broken.

So what to you reckon? Is there a fast, easy way of doing this? A distributed way-back-machine?