Google grudgingly added a delete button to Gmail a while ago, but they continue to prove that there's no delete button for the Web.

Today Google released one of the most powerful (and under-hyped) recent products, an archive of news articles going back to the 1700s.  Did you know that the first use of the term 'email' was in 1772?  Oh, wait, maybe all those articles on a technology not invented until the late 20th century are just OCR errors of old printed newspapers.  In any case, articles that have long been forgotten and left for dead have now been resurrected and given a new lease on life, in a boon for content owners and citizens alike.

Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert cartoons wrote a snarky blog post about the death of "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin.  Adams found out today that the Web has no delete button after he deleted the post from his blog, but it proliferated across the Web anyway.  As of this post it's still in Google's cache.  And if Google removes it from their cache, plenty of bloggers have preserved Adams' sentiments for eternity - just search for [ crikey "crazy seal"].

I remember when Google themselves tried to hit the delete button to flush an inconvenient item down the memory hole, but until Google adds a delete button to the Web, that's gonna be difficult.