30,000 YouTube Videos Removed, And One Blog Suffers Greatly For It

I've always wondered how it would feel to have YouTube videos I'd blogged get taken down. I tend to think of blog posts on sites like this one to have some lasting value, but if you start ending up with a lot of broken links, your old content is toast. Ars Technica (and many others) reported yesterday that the now Google-owned YouTube had taken down 30,000 Japanese television clips. The move undoubtedly hit no one harder than the creator of the blog TV In Japan, but he is defiantly optimistic:

But I want you to know, I will not give up. In fact, Japanese clips get removed from YouTube all the time. Sure, links get broken but there’s like a bajillion Japanese people uploading TV at any given moment. I will still find the good, the bad (meaning good), the perverted, the intriguing and, most especially, the abusive.

I wonder if he would feel any differently if he were writing about content he had something to say about, and the text was difficult or impossible to follow without the visuals. I don't mean that to sound critical. There's nothing wrong with getting a daily dose of whatever and never looking back. But there's also something to be said for looking back incessantly just because you find something extremely satisfying, and that's a big part of what TV In Japan offers - tons of material indexed and blogged and waiting for you to waste your time on. Thinking you're just keeping one step ahead of the content police means you are officially just a web-based, video-enabled desk calendar. It won't be long before a content scraper can do that better than a blogger can.