As part of the zMarket project, zLab is considering building a research platform for electronic markets. This is the sort of shared infrastructure a 1997 NSF workshop called for, which we discussed in an earlier blog entry.
Unfortunately, the original link to the Netlab workshop report died in the last month. It’s odd how content can survive seven years, but not seven years and a month. The University of Iowa redid its webpages and now there are at least 29 pages with dead links to it. Amazingly, there were no other copies of it on the web. Not even on Google’s cache, since the original page now returns 404.
After some initial shock and a half-hour of searching, it occurred to me that even though I use a Mac, Adam’s handy Google Desktop Search might have kept a copy. However, it seems like he never clicked through on that blog entry.
However, I realized that our zSearch experiment existed for just this purpose: indexing the collective knowledge of our group by crawling the content we link to as well — and the Nutch cache still had the page. So now we can both send a gentle reminder of this problem to Iowa and point you all at the resurrected National Science Foundation NetLab Workshop Report.