End of Free at NYT

The New York Times site was perhaps my favorite site on the web. It is comprehensive, nicely designed and, until this week, linkrot. Linkrot is what happens when pages fail to remain at the same URL. I thought the NYT had a decent policy balancing stable linkage with the desire to profit from the archives. Although looking for an article earlier than a month old pointed towards the paid archive, existing links to NYT articles continued to work for years– until this week. Now, all articles older than 30 days can only be retrieved through the pay archive. Actually, articles prior to February 2001 are still available. Blech.
Linkrot keeps the web from being as useful as it could be. I keep the sideblog (linky linky) to keep track of the most interesting things I’ve read. How useful will it be when half of the links are dead? It’s why at work we had to print out everything we wanted to ever refer to again, thereby wasting reams of paper.
More at Tech Law Advisor, FurdLog, DaveNet, Glenn Fleishman and bIPlog’s Mary Hodder