Saved Content

 

 

The raison d'être of this Saved Content website, is to serve and preserve useful content in order to provide relevant information and advertising that will aid web surfers in supplementing their knowledge, forming their decisions, fulfilling their needs, and guiding them to their eventual destinations or goals.

 

 

The Internet is, undeniably, a valuable storehouse and source of information. Ever since it achieved widespread acceptance and entered into the collective public consciousness and into popular culture, content has been created and added continuously to the World Wide Web at a relentless pace.

 

Content contains the information and stimuli needed by users to form a basis for their decisions and to eventually shape the course of their actions. For good or bad, content and information, disseminated by the Internet, plays a role in affecting the lives of countless numbers of people and as a result contributes appreciably in shaping our world, as we know it.

 

 

 

 

Carvings and engravings on metal, rock, and stone are eventually replaced by handwriting on materials similar to paper. Handwriting gives way to printing. Books, newspapers, and magazines are introduced. Film photography, recorded music, vinyl music albums, cinema, radio, television, home video cameras and recorders, and video tapes are invented. The current digital and online age was born with the introduction of the personal computer, CDs, the Internet, digital devices, DVDs, and memory cards.

 

Film photography and printed media such as newspapers and magazines have been the most negatively affected by the shift to the digital and online age. The number of film cameras being produced and sold, have dropped dramatically since 2001. A significant number of magazines and some newspapers have stopped publishing physical print issues and are only focusing on their websites and this is a trend that is likely to continue. The shift from analog and printed media to digital and online media continues to move forward without disruption.

 

The particular technological developments that gave birth to the digital and online age results in a faster pace of change and allows for the easier, faster, and cheaper creation of content. This results in the quicker release of new products, which makes older products obsolete and unwanted more quickly. The same is true for content that is created on the Internet.

 

 

Users and content producers focus more on recent products and current content rather than past products and content. When demand for older products or older content decreases, the expected response is also to decrease the supply of older products or content, or maybe even discontinue or abandon them totally. With physical products and content found in physical mediums, if these are discontinued or abandoned, these older products and mediums would still remain in existence, preserving their content.

 

The problem with the Internet, unlike physical products and mediums, is if content or even websites are discontinued or abandoned, they are usually deleted or forgotten completely until they are eventually lost. Once they are gone, these websites and their content would no longer exist and there would be no way to bring back the lost information unless copies were kept and made available to the public.

 

On the Internet, the spotlight is almost always on the most current content. Web users continually move on to content that is most relevant to their current wants and needs and leave behind outdated content that is no longer relevant. Content producers must always have updated content in order to attract web users who are mostly interested in new content.

 

Since there is almost no audience for outdated content, no effort is made to preserve outdated content, and they may even be discontinued or abandoned completely. On the Internet, change may be a death sentence for some content and the information these provided.

 

 

Generally, the improvement of technologies provides lasting benefits; however, they may come at a price. For the most part, making the change from analog and printed media to digital and online media has proven to be advantageous. On the other hand, it has also increased the likelihood that useful information may be lost forever due to the decrease in life expectancy of the new mediums.

 

Handled properly, books and other paper-based mediums can be preserved for centuries. Metal, rock, and stone mediums can last much longer than that. Video tapes only have a lifespan of between 5 to 30 years. Memory cards may last between 10 to 30 years. CDs and DVDs only have a life expectancy of between 50 to 100 years and possibly even shorter.

 

In the transition from video tapes to CDs, DVDs, and memory cards, the ability to play or transfer video from these tapes, decreases as demand and supply for VCRs decrease. With the loss of the ability to play or to transfer video from video tapes, the likelihood of their content being lost forever, increases.

 

Information posted to the World Wide Web has no definite lifespan; however, with the pace of change on the Internet, it’s extremely rare to see web pages that have lasted for 10 years or more. If no copy is archived, either online or offline, deleted pages or websites may be lost forever.

 

 

The Internet provides significant amounts of content; however, there is no guarantee that all that content will be available in the future. So much valuable information will be lost, simply because older content is no longer in demand or is outdated, even if they may still prove useful to a few people. That is why it is so important to try to preserve content that others may regard as outdated since content such as these are the most at risk of being discontinued or abandoned even though these may still be relevant to a few more people and could still benefit someone.

 

Not all content on the Internet can be useful for a particular person. In fact, most content on the Internet is completely useless for the average web user. Some content may actually misdirect, mislead, or misinform people. All these useless content pollutes a World Wide Web that is already confusing, containing content that is mostly irrelevant to what users are actually searching for. This seriously hinders the quest of users to find what they’re looking for and makes it more difficult than it already is.

 

 

 

Unfortunately, due to the heavy commercialization or monetization of the Internet, the Web is littered with sites that offer almost no content or content that was crafted simply to attract visitors so that they may be led or coerced to click on ads or to buy products. Not only do these sites lack enough information, some may even make no sense whatsoever, their reason for existing is only to lure unsuspecting web surfers to visit their pages and to induce visitors to make money for the website. These sites only pollute the Internet and offer nothing beneficial to users.

 

Rather than benefiting users by presenting useful information so that they have the correct information to make proper decisions or at least point them to destinations that may eventually assist them in completing their decisions, these spam web sites dupe or coerce users into making decisions that benefit the website and other companies. The focus of these websites is solely on their bottom line and none whatsoever on the needs of users. In practice, they do more harm than good.