The great Alan Levine has unearthed and posted a version of a Second Life presentation Tom Woodward and I did back in 2008. It’s a personal favorite of mine because we managed to integrate elements of John Carpenter’s They Live! and The Thing seamlessly and subtly into the presentation, with a grand finale of setting everyone in the virtual world audience on fire. Those were the days!
I can happily report that my original post on this presentation now has video—the masses had been clamoring for it! But beyond the video, which I am fired up Alan has brought back from the dead, it’s untimely death is of interest. It was hosted on Blip.tv (as were a few of my currently missing EdTech Survivalist videos) and this video service did a webrexit. What’s more, the NMC had a site dedicated to the conference that is also living in oblivion now, although I was able to find PDFs of our presentation slides and the conference program on the nmc.org/files domain (I copied them to my web hosting account for posterity). But in terms of the page I linked to when I was able to keep track of my presentations on my CV site, it’s gone. 404 city. Dead link valley. I guess 2008 is no longer the domain of New Media 
But for me it seems good form that institutions and organizations should take some responsibility to archive and keep the links for various conferences they have run and presentations they recruited folks to present. I mean don’t you think an outfit that calls itself the New Media Consortium should be able to thoughtfully an intentionally archive and preserve that work? But I know the answer to my own rhetorical question. People come and go from organizations and institutions, priorities change, continuity is hard, memories fade, and links die. I guess we can chalk it up to the way of the world wide web, but if that’s the case Alan’s idea that that any cohesion we get from the web that was will be thanks to a few individuals who had the forethought and took the time to save stuff rings truer than ever. Luckily I have Alan in my community, and I can benefit from his longterm vision of the web as a communal memory bank of experience, not a series of open, yet dead, resources. My money is on the dog in the zombie suit!
