I’ve stopped Google from caching this blog, it’s the only logical option.
Things change, circumstances change, events happen, our opinions change. The web though appears timeless, an article written 10 years ago can easily crop up in a search today and nobody reads the date. The advice that one might have given 10 years ago however may be entirely contradictory to the advice one would give today. The opinions expressed before the current recession may be entirely at odds with today’s. The conclusion we inevitably come to is that being able to edit and delete an article is really rather important.
Not only this but from a purely selfish point of view we might need to delete or edit articles – imagine writing an article that praised a particular company only to find out later that your own company was being taken over by one of their competitors. If the first time your new managers hear of you it’s because someone is telling them you’ve written an article supporting the opposition that stain is going to be difficult to remove from your reputation.
Articles can hang around in caches for a very long time after they’ve been taken down or edited on the original site. I’ve found myself writing articles and not publishing them simply because of this – I think to myself that I may change my mind about the subject at some point, or that the article is pertinent only to the world that exists today. So it’s a no-brainer for me and I would suggest any blogger, if you want to say anything that you may ever have cause to change or delete later, you have to try to stop it being cached.