The cloud is fickle

Following up on my recent concerns about archiving, stability, and the scientific record, I was disturbed to read this:

Yahoo! is shutting down Yahoo! Video next year. March 2011. March 15, 2011, to be exact. They will delete all user-generated content on that day.

Yahoo! Video was the second-most used video hosting site behind YouTube. Number 2! And all of it, all video, is going to be deleted. Thousands and thousands of videos, many of which are likely hosted nowhere else, completely gone.

With my original post, I was trying to argue that it wouldn't take civilization ending to pose archiving problems. All it would take would be slow, creeping link rot.

The closing of a major video service isn’t quite the collapse of Western civilization. But it’s more than link rot.