For years Ed Felten of Princeton has been one of the best (most thoughtful, smart, informed, perceptive) bloggers on the Web. His Freedom to Tinker, has become a must-read for me and thousands of others. But in recent times, Freedom to Tinker has morphed from Professor Felten’s personal property into a collective blog hosted by Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, a research centre devoted to the intersection of digital technologies and public life. The blog now publishes comment and analysis written by the Centre’s faculty, students, and friends.

All of which is fine and dandy. There’s still lots of great stuff on Freedom to Tinker. But in the process of morphing from a personal space to a collective blog, Professor Felten’s archive seems to have gone awol. The result is that all the links I have to his writings — and use in my teaching and journalism — no longer work.

The problem applies inside the blog itself also. For example, its search engine returns two of the archive entries to which I had linked.

But when one clicks on either link, one is taken to the top page of the blog. So it seems that deep linking to content on Freedom to Tinker has effectively been disabled.

This is the kind of thing one expects from clueless media organisations. But one would have thought that Princeton was a cut above that.