Search Tools Consulting: The Average Lifespan of a Web Page

I'll talk about an interesting statistic that came out of the research I did about the "average lifespan of a web page". It seems existential: What is a lifespan? What is a web page? What is average? What about greater web sites? How is this related to URL turnover? What about institutional vs. personal vs.social networking communities? Who decides and when?

I will also report briefly on The UK Web Archive. The British Library got tired of waiting for the copyright law to be interpreted, so they're going ahead and indexing everything on the .uk top-level domain. IBM is providing services for handling this "Big Data" (new-ish jargon term), including Apache Hadoop, Pig Latin, Nutch, Open Calais, InfoSphere and ManyEyes. They're playing with metadata extraction and interface ideas. The one they're currently touting is a spreadsheet interface (thus the name BigSheets). My articles on this are at: http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/British-Library-and-IBM-Team… and http://searchtools.livejournal.com/91002.html.