templatedata

One of my pet hates is content that is posted, then forgotten about. I know there are plenty of pages on University websites that should have been blown away long ago. When I think of them and the difficulty of tracking them down then convincing people to remove them I feel like crawling under my desk and crying. There seems to be no way to deal with them. And I know I can be as guilty of lax content management as anyone else. Sometimes there is just TOO MUCH content to handle. Timely well-written content across an entire site requires a lot of work and websites are not always (actually, that should be very RARELY) resourced adequately to maintain content to a decent level. Not in the University world anyway.

Ok, so I've had my whinge.

Sun have come up with a novel way of getting people to remove old content: a sniffer dog called Chuvo.

Chuvo is a Portuguese water dog owned by Nicole Yankelovich at Sun Labs. About 10 years ago, Nicole posted a dedication to Chuvo on her "people page" at Sun Labs, and promptly forgot about it. But the Internet found Chuvo; on a good month, Chuvo gets 3 or 4 visits completely unsolicited. OK, maybe it's not a very big number of visits, and that's the point -- we now have this question we ask ourselves about any questionable page on Sun.com: "Does this page even get as many views as Chuvo?" If the answer is "no" then we put the page on a "purge candidates" list. And, if occasionally a content owner expresses alarm at his page being a purge candidate, we can ask him politely: "Um, did you know your page gets beat by a Portuguese water dog?"

I am sure we could find our own equivalent of Chuvo...