In late 2006, reasonably well-known blogger Jacqueline Passey (often known by her four-barreled name, as seen in the title), wrote a post about her dating criteria, more or less.

I shall not revisit the ridiculous bunfight that set off, though blog commentary on that post continues to be the main thing that comes up when you Google Ms. Passey’s name.

Out of rather idle curiosity (she used to be the girlfriend of Not Johnny Chan, who I have sort-of known since SFU), I looked her up, and found that her blog had . . . disappeared.

Well, you know the usual steps: wayback machine, a little study, no big mystery. She announced her retirement, declared that having a job and a steady boyfriend was better than having a blog, and good for her.

Though it’s surprising that someone like her was willing to not only throw over the blogging itself, but after less than a year, has let the domain lapse. I can only assume that work, school, and private life are in order, and wish her well at all of that.

Though I am curious that the requiem for her blog posted on a friend’s site has also been taken away. That site using fairly sequential post numbers, we can see from both the archived link on Ms. Passey’s site where the post should be, and a little poking around determines the existence of posts 30 and 33, but 31 and 32 have been deleted.

And thus the interesting part. Not her reasons for not blogging or letting her domain lapse, but the surprisingly fast first-person disappearance she has made from search results, and the ephemeral nature of the web.

Of course, some very smart people have spent a lot of time figuring out plans for persistent web entities that wouldn’t suffer from link rot. I fear that the Web Archive is about the best solution so far. Link rot never sleeps.

I’ve worked fairly hard to make my online presence persistent. It’s almost comforting to know how easy it is to fade into the background noise. And to get a real life.