How links die – remember WorkFast.tv?
On Thursday, Robert Scoble linked to a Rob La Gesse link to a Forbes story about La Gesse and Scoble.
The story was written by Shel Israel.
Needless to say, Israel was ethically obligated to include some disclosures in his story.
I’ve collaborated with Scoble on three projects: We co-authored Naked Conversations, a hardcover book on business blogging: The Conversational Corporation, a DowJones ebook and Workfast a FastCompany video program.
If you go to the disclosure page, you’ll see that Israel links to all three projects.
Sort of.
If you follow the link that Israel provides for Workfast, you’ll end up at http://www.stevebendt.com/?p=22. No, this is not a FastCompany web page, but it is a page that includes a copy of a WorkFast interview.
Those who have read me for a while may recall one of my more popular posts (as measured in terms of comments received), a July 15, 2008 post entitled On Loren Feldman’s statement about Shel Israel and FastCompany. The post concerned the news (confirmed by Robert Scoble in a comment) that Israel had left FastCompany.TV “due to community feedback.”
But that was not the end of the story. Scoble continued at FastCompany.TV, but as Israel notes in his Forbes story:
When Fast Company TV soon started disassembling, La Gesse went into action.
Barbanica was laid off first. “I spent a little while spreading the word that I was looking for work, then my wife and I hopped on a plane to Hawaii. I was laying on the beach chilling, when Rob called. He wanted to know if I was still available. Available? You bet!”
Rocky joined on and his first priority was helping La Gesse recruit Scoble. That turned out to be easy and fast. FastCompany released Scoble from his contract and he immediately joined Rackspace.
And you may not remember this – I didn’t – but I wrote about that, also. And no, I never heard from Robert Safian. But my question has been answered, in a sense. While the fastcompany.tv domain is registered through the end of this year, attempts to go to fastcompany.tv result in a “could not connect” error.
You can still find FastCompany’s collection of WorkFast videos, but oddly enough some of them now have March 2010 publication dates.
And a few years from now, even those videos may disappear. At least with a book there’s a chance of an old book gathering dust in a collection somewhere. With streaming content, there’s less of a chance that the information would be retained.
Which means that future generations may not be able to see Robert Scoble dance.
tymshft 