If you check the WebCite technical documentation at http://www.webcitation.org/doc/WebCiteBestPracticesGuide.pdf you will see that WebCite also supports a transparent format like http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=this&date=that (retrieving THIS url at THAT date). The abbreviated format using an ID instead (http://www.webcitation.org/aSDHJE) is handy for print publications to save space, and is also used by publishers who in the references section cite the original URL plus the WebCited (archived) URL (see for example references in http://www.jmir.org, or also the BMC journals).

I guess we could (and will) also make the database table public (the table which maps WebCite snapshot IDs to URLs/dates).

Gunther Eysenbach
WebCite initiator

It’s interesting to be able to do it in a lightweight, on-demand way, is all.

@Mr Gunn “The most serious problem is that by choosing a TinyURL scheme, you’re stripping information out of the links themselves, something that bloggers have worked hard to put there by creating meaningful. human-readable, permalinks.”

Agreed. I would like the best of all worlds. To control my own namespace, and to assure persistence and reliable citation. What I actually like most this discussion is that it forces us to tease apart the separable components and think about how we might recompose them.

@Geoffrey Bilder: Over here — http://www.crossref.org/CrossTech/2007/10/nlm_blog_citation_guidelines_1.html — you said: “It seems to me that a system for reliably citing blogs and wikis would benefit many communities.”

Exactly. There are no perfect solutions but for the most part we’re not even trying. The blogosphere is doing a pretty darn good job of citation analysis, but is lousy at preserving what is cited.

We oughta have higher expectations, and be thinking about ways to achieve them, is all I’m saying.

0) In the above posting, substitute my use of the word “cache” with the word “archive.” Cliff Lynch rightly pointed out that I was using the wrong term.
1) There is increasing interest on the part of academic bloggers in making sure that they are able to differentiate their professionally related blogging, from their posts about their cats, vacations, etc. The BPR3 initiative (bpr3.org) is an interesting development in this area as is an upcoming conference on Science Blogging (scienceblogging.com). I should think that these bloggers might also be concerned about the relative ephemerality of their content as it is currently managed.
2) General Bloggers might be interested in paying for a service like this because they are realizing increasingly that, like academics, they *too* now live in a world where citation persistence starts to matter. I can imagine a service like WordPress or ScienceBlogs offering a “professional blogger package” that included assignment of DOIs and archiving postings (as described in the above-mentioned CrossTech posting).
3) Publishers might be interested in financing such a service in order to help them increase the utility of the work they publish. Clearly, an article where all the citations actually lead to something is far more useful than one where the citations break. We’ve got a solution for ensuring the integrity of links to more formally published content, but what are we going to do about relatively ephemeral content?

That’s not the worst thing, though. The most serious problem is that by choosing a TinyURL scheme, you’re stripping information out of the links themselves, something that bloggers have worked hard to put there by creating meaningful. human-readable, permalinks.

The problem of persistent content has to be solved by the content publishers. If you’re worried that a page you cite won’t be around in 5-10 years, the way to handle that is to make a local copy of it. If you’re worried that citations of your content won’t work 5-10 years from now, the best way to handle that is to use a redirect and keep control of the domain. If you can’t do that, you need to take responsibility for breaking links to your content and update the referring cites.

It just seems to be that the cost of maintaining a mirror of the web vastly exceeds the value of maintaining links to content that the content owner and citing author didn’t feel important enough to keep accessible.

Thanks, and late congrats on the ‘new’ job.

Steve Bosak (formerly with Palindrome/Seagate Software/Zenith Data Systems; former writer at PC Tech Journal, the Chicago Trib)

Since WebCite adds their banner to the top of the page, the smart move would be for them to add some contextual advertising (like Google AdSense), either at the top or bottom of the page. It could be very minimal, and clearly marked “Ads placed by WebCite” so it would be obvious that the ads weren’t part of the original content. That’s the kind of content for which contextual ads really make sense, and I’d feel a lot better about using WebCite if I knew they had a real business model.

That reminds me of another url-shrinker I’ve been thinking you might be interested in, conceptually: http://decenturl.com/. Instead of obfuscating url’s, it constructs friendly url’s based on the page title.