Sun.com Customer Experience and Stuff: Notes from the Sun.com customer experience team.

In ancient Egypt, a new Pharaoh would often order that the names and history of their predecessors be chiseled from monuments and temples.

Simon Phipps points out there's a modern corporate equivalent, in his posting on Airbrushing History:
Executives and plain old employees come and go, and it is often tempting for their former corporate employers to exorcise them from the corporate blog site. My advice is: Don't do this at all on blogs. And, only do this on the corporate web site if it is in the interest of clarity and the public good.

On blogs.sun.com, Simon points out, we follow a policy of leaving blogs of alumni employees in place; after all, the employee may return and pick up the blog again. 

On the other hand, for the other Sun.com web sites, we indeed do some editing. While blogs are personal or group journals, a corporate web site is supposed to reflect current state information. So, we do eriodic cleanups ensure that the outside world doesn't get confused about who's who. For instance, our fondly regarded former Sun colleague John Loiacono is running a division at Adobe now... We removed his Sun executive biography (so the press and public don't get confused, and also so that they know that equally esteemed software chief Rich Green is running things). But you can still find lots of content on the site from old press Q&A, etc. that mentioned John. His soul is still embodied in Sun.com (which is appropriate since he managed the web team a couple of times.)

Another reason we do cleanup is to purge out of date or confusing content that visitors may find via search. If you're reading a new product announcement from 1992, that could be confusing. (See my previous posting on the Chuvo Test for purging content.)

Now, I fully expect to see comments that point out:

• We still have old content on our sites that needs to be cleaned up (truth: not all of it is under tight watch)
• We need a "last updated" date on all pages (truth: we have architected for this, but it's tricky to know what we should use to reflect an update, since trivial updates may not signal that someone has scoured all the content on te page)
  
• We deleted some favorite bit of old content, like Mark & Marc's original interview with YAHOO's David Filo and Jerry Yang or Rick Levine's classic web style guide (mirrored elsewhere on the net)

Unfortunately, with almost 1.5 million pages, there's a lot to keep track of and a lot to update. As unofficial site historian, I sometimes get pangs of guilt when I see old stuff getting deleted, but usually it's going away because nobody is reading it or it's old and crufty. It's easier to purge than to rewrite old stuff to make it relevant and accurate, so this is almost never done at Sun or anywhere else. Well, except Wikipedia!

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