DV.com, companion website to the printed magazine recently redesigned. In doing so, they broke every single incoming link to anything they’ve ever put online.

I noticed this while working on an article about what it means for video to be “Broadcast Legal”. Who knows if anything is still even there, I couldn’t find an article title I linked through and the useless search results were prefaced by a warning that “Most content now requires free membership
“. Content? I can’t find any. I haven’t registered yet, and I doubt I will. Thankfully the Google cache contained most all of the content from the pages I can no longer directly link to. I’m not the only one pissed at this, Trish and Chris Meyer also seem quite annoyed (read the comment at the top, most every link on the page is broken).

Online publishers need to make a commitment to leaving content where it is otherwise they can not be considered a reference source. To a certain extent, any site requiring registration can not be a reference source, including the New York Times. It’s trivial stupidity like this which makes it harder and harder to learn anything and completely undermines the potential of the Web as a resource for knowledge.

I’m glad I run my own site.

Links to DV.com were intentionally omitted.