The Real World: Key West sponsor, Mystic Tan, asked us to build and manage a blog to run in conjunction with the show.  The show ended in July and the client sees no need to continue the project.  The blog is called “Inside the booth” and is authored by Ricky Croft from Mystic Tan.

What do we do?  Are we obligated to keep it up and running forever even though Mystic Tan is not going to pay us for continued management and hosting?  There are hundreds of links into the site, by taking it down we effectively break the web according to Adaptive Path, Mike Arrington and David Parmet (guys I really respect).  On an ironic sidenote, the Adaptive Path post titled “The Web is Fragile don’t Break it!” now shows a 404 error.  I am not sure why they took it down, but I suspect it has to do with the veracity of the information they received.

Any ideas?  What obligation does the world have to continue to maintain electronic ideas in the form of websites when the ideas have run their course?  Some people say that bandwidth and space are cheap so you should just keep everything up and running.  But what about people to keep things running?  What about WordPress upgrades?  Do we upgrade the sites that are historical?  What about security patches?  If we are running various historical sites at various version levels and there are security issues we will have to resolve them on a blog by blog basis.  In some cases we will have to upgrade them to current software revisions.  At the end of the day, the cost isn’t just bandwidth and space – there is a management overhead that will grow with each piece of “history” we become responsible for.