This website will self-destruct in five seconds...

A current preoccupation of mine is the notion of online permanence, not only with regards to not deleting content (which in some cases in tantamount to burning books, imho - although in others it's arguably more of a public service...) but also in maintaining consistent and permanent URLs (which, whilst we're writing the wish-list, should also be globally accessible).

So I was somewhat ambivalent on hearing of disposableWebPage, a wiki-powered site whose raison d'être is to make non-permanent webpages. The site enables you to create a page in a matter of moments and then set a time limit for when you want that page to expire, up to a maximum of 90 days. Somewhat bizarrely, the page doesn't actually disappear until 2 weeks after the expiry date, which rules out using it for providing a time-limited window for users to access content (although I guess simple cutting-and-pasting would also scupper any such attempts). Interestingly, Google has already indexed and cached 176 disposable webpages (of the 6,322 which have been created, according to the site's front page).

I guess on the scale of crimes against digital data preservation then disposableWebPage is a minor offender and at least it's up front about when its pages will be deleted (unlike many content providers/hosts). I'm tempted to visit the site with the Alexa toolbar installed to see if I can persuade The Wayback Machine to archive a copy, although on balance they've probably got better things to be doing with their terabytes. A far bigger crime is the fact that the CAPTCHA didn't appear in Firefox, forcing me to fire up Internet Explorer for Mac. Don't worry - I'm alright now...