Here's my deal, twice today some links that I had for documentation went away, one because of a partner and one because of Oracle's biomass oozing over other companies.
So this is my idea, have a web service that acts as a proxy go-between and archive recovery tool for your important links. It combines some of the idea of the bit.ty and tinyurl sites, but what those lack is a way to see what the linker really intended.
You, the linker, found some important information. Maybe it's an API for some code you're working on, or maybe it's someone's blog post that solves that problem you were having today. Either way, you end up linking to it on your blog, or in your Javadocs with an @see flag. The problem is, easy come easy go. There's nothing you can do about the host. They might belly up, or be absorbed into the Oracle ooze and have their links redirected into a oblivion.
The proxy stores the current contents at the destination site. Clicking on the proxy link, brings up a dialog which has some options, but goes away after a while. Meanwhile, it continues to the originally specified link. Now, if the link has been modified, lost or redirected, you, the user, can choose instead to bring up the archived link. (It may or may not have been webdevilled so the images, css, js etc would still work). Otherwise you can click on the dialog and confirm you got there ok.
Hand out the elephant url, because, an elephant never forgets.
