"Erase and rewind": Thoughts on the BBC's plans to delete 172 websites

The deletion of the sites is purely political.<p>The BBC needs to make visible cuts in places where the British (anti-BBC) press accuse them of providing services that they believe should be provided by private companies.<p>If the site doesn't vanish the press wouldn't see it as a real cut, would they?

Hmm. Some of these sites look like genuine losses, but most are just promo sites for BBC series, at least some of which have been cancelled for years (and some of <i>those</i> looked to have only lasted a few episodes). I think fairly few of these deletions can really be compared to erasing and re-using the master tapes for those shows.<p>I'm ambivalent. I'm generally pro-preservation, even of ephemera, but I feel rather worse for the people getting the axe than, say, the sunsetting of the pages promoting the Concert for Diana. (After all, do we gain anything more than mild amusement that <a href="http://goo.gl/sd4xD" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/sd4xD</a> is still up after ~15 years?)<p>As for the worthier sites, it looks like people should take it up with the BBC that those sites are vanishing while BBC promo fluff like <a href="http://www.badwolf.org.uk" rel="nofollow">http://www.badwolf.org.uk</a> (warning: may still have sound) isn't on the list, yet.

The WW2 People's War site that this article highlighted as particularly bad to lose has in fact already been archived by the British Library:<p><a href="http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/target/114827/source/search" rel="nofollow">http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/target/114827/source/searc...</a>

To be fair, the British <i>Broadcasting</i> Corporation ought to have been a lot clearer about its remit in the past. Take Dirac for example, why was the British taxpayer funding that development work when H.264 was already widely supported? It's no wonder now that they are being required to make cuts, they had become a huge sprawling monster with a finger in every pie, no matter how relevant.

They could probably keep them running for the price of some football pundit's yearly salary.

When things are no longer relevant, I have no problem with them going away. If it means a lot to you, make yourself a personal copy.<p>Humans often have a hoarding instinct, and it's hard to shake that temptation. How many of us keep every email ever sent to us over the last 10 years? How many of us have 1TB of personal storage on our PCs. and we're running out of space? How many of us have the phone bill from 5 years ago filed neatly away in some box? Let some stuff go.

Put it on a $100 2TB hard drive and give it to Google or the WayBackMachine.

It's not about holding the information, it's about serving it. The BBC makes a whole lot of websites, for when they mention stuff in dramas (Think Bad Wolf in first series of Doctor Who). They will hold all the information they ever made, offline, just like all the TV they can keep, they do.<p>What they should do is make sure the Internet Archive has it all. And then stop hosting it, stop paying for the domains.<p>These websites are only mentioned in dramas, they are pretty much useless after a few weeks. If you're watching first series Dr Who and want to see the sites, you can live with using the Internet Archive (Wayback machine).