This is nothing more than a few observations concerning the significant increase in traffic I have been getting these last few days regarding my post that 99.29% of web sites are obsolete
, from the fact that only 0.71% of sites testes were valid HTML.
- Dagfinn R. Parnas wrote a message about his masters thesis.
- I read the thesis, found it interesting, tabulated the results and blogged it.
- Got some normal linkage for a while, no major increases in traffic.
- Read an interesting W3c article about improving invalid sites.
- The article states that running a survey to determine how many sites are valid, I comment that this has been done, in the thesis.
- The time between my posting of that comment and Bill Masons tipping of Zeldman to my blog entry summarising the data leads to the conclusion that Bill read my comment.
- Number of recorded Hits to the site quadruples (even more than my last Zeldman mention)
So why mention this? Without permalinks and archives this information may not have been spread as easily over the web, the number of referrers is growing rapidly as different sites pick up on this and comment on it. As I have noted when we create a mechanism by which knowledge can be perpetuated we increase the likelihood that this knowledge will be built upon and more widely disseminated. Especially when authors are liberal with their citations. The practice of citing references allows the web of interconnections to grow and knowledge to be more easily located.
Anyway I’ll leave you with something a little lighter to look over.