Remember the moblogging site Textamerica.com (TA)? In 2003/2004 when this blog was getting off the ground, TA was a site with some promise and hype. And then Flickr rose in prominence and pretty much killed them in the moblogging popularity space, and yet they still limp along.

When I used a camera phone I sent pics to my picture blog at tdavid.textamerica.com. A Hmm search says I linked to them in 18 past posts. Those links now are all redirecting to the main textamerica.com site. Did I ever get any email from them saying they closed my account? Not that I know of, but a look at their terms of service indicates (emphasis mine):

Textamerica.com reserves the right to cancel any person’s registration and to remove any materials related to such member without notice or cause.

I hadn’t sent any pictures to them in a long time, so perhaps inactivity might have been what prompted them to axe my account? Or maybe it was posts like this one: Textamerica hardware upgrade has some members wondering: where did our pictures go?

Whatever the case, it doesn’t really matter because Textamerica is going to be for commercial account only (unless you are one of the few with a lifetime personal account):

As of November 1, 2007, Textamerica is transitioning into being a Commercial Only Service Provider and will no longer support individual users with personal account moblogs unless they hold a Lifetime Membership. All non-commercial account holders who do not hold a Lifetime Membership have until November 30, 2007 to archive and remove existing images and/or videos.

This Textamerica rise and fall for personal moblogging reminds me of why I’m reluctant to spend a significant time at third party sites. Even if the sites are mega cool (which, in retrospect, Textamerica never really was) and getting a ton of hype, I’ve seen so many Textamericas come and go that it makes it harder for me to get too involved elsewhere. This cynicism might have a lot to do with why I haven’t been an avid visitor of Flickr, Facebook, MySpace and so on. I have boarded the Second Life ship (which on some days seems like the Titanic), but that’s more because I’m fascinated in where the virtual world space is headed in the future, not only or even primarily Second Life. I’m part of a group blog at VTOReality.com that actively follows this space. So far the successes seem to be more about gaming than business, but there are some notable exceptions.

I digress. Let’s get back to linkrot like Textamerica.

How to deal with linkrot on your blog
Now that Hmm has 18 posts containing links to pages that Textamerica is redirecting to its homepage, how should I deal with these posts/links? Here’s what I am doing, but am open to additional suggestions/advice/feedback:

1. removing all hyperlinks to textamerica.com except the one in this post
2. where the post doesn’t make sense without the linked page/image, I’m adding an update text with a link to this post in brackets [like this]. These days I try to make very few posts that rely on content linked from a third party site, so even if the site goes down or changes like Textamerica has, the post will still make sense. Linkrot sucks.

I was tempted to delete some of these old posts, particularly the shorter ones with little other content, but that would be breaking my own links. How do you handle linkrot in your blog archives? Do you fix the broken links or just leave them broken? Every blog out there that links out to third party sites is subject to linkrot in varying degrees. The question is how to deal with it as your blog grows? My current strategy is when this comes up deal with it. I probably should have a more structured linkrot maintenance plan. Do you?

Update 9:47am PST: Updated all 18 archived posts with links to Textamerica and my now defunct moblog there. Along the way, I found broken links to other places in the same posts and removed those as well.

• Halloween 2003 moblogging
• California fires raging
• Vegas bound or bound for Vegas
• Textamerica hardware upgrade has some members wondering: where did our pictures go?
• Flickr picture sharing continues to heat up
• The downside of embedding video posts from third parties using third party hosting