Pet Peeves - No Dates

 STATUS: dog tired

Music: Gangnam Style

The modern internet has been around almost 20 years now. Recent statistics suggest there are 150,000 new URLs per day and 350,000,000 registered domains. In 2008 google indexed 1 trillion unique URLs. Viva the information age.

With the massive size and scope of the internet, any and all information can be found and the information content of the net makes an encyclopedia look like a kid's book. If I need to find anything, I run immediately to google. Medical, cooking, parenting, cars, gardening, anything you need to know about can be found on the net.

Of course, because anyone can post a website claiming anything, good search techniques and a discriminating mind must be used to discern which information to trust. And that brings me to my pet peeve. Because, in addition to learning how to separate the real from the deceptive or downright fraudulent, it's also important to realize that information expires.

It's obvious when you think about it, any kind of medical or scientific information will become outdated to a degree and will need updating regularly. This could be expecially problematic with regards to drugs or self-diagnoses (which is apparently becoming very common). Product information, especially on software (and definitely fan sites on games) need regular updating as products come and go and change so quickly in the modern world. So, part of good internet technique is checking the date on the information provided.

Unfortunately, it seems many sites do not realize the importance of dating their sites and end up doing a great disservice to their viewers by potentially providing out of date information. I've long since lost count of the number of times I've found a page with the information I wanted, only to be unable to find a date, and thus unable to just the validity of the information. In such cases, the page and all content on it become useless to me.

I can hope that, like record and movie companies using outdated financial models, this is just another sign of the times changing more rapidly than our thoughts. But I feel it's a potentially very dangerous one. Sure people digging up a chocolate chip cookie recipie from 10 years ago is not going to be a problem, but old exercise or diet information could be harmful and old drug information could be deadly.

So please, if you are a web master, ensure that all your pages, and all articles posted by contributors, have accurate dates included in the header. After all, the date is as important a piece of information when judging validity as the content.

Insight and longevity.