PURL -- persistent URL -- has been around a while, but I only just discovered I could make one myself: http://purl.oclc.org/net/hughw/blog. That URL will forever redirect to http://hughw.blogspot.com/, they think. If I move the blog, I have to update the pointer.
(TinyURL is another useful service for link resolution. Its purpose in life is to shorten long URLS to a manageable length you can actually type; if you move your resource you can't update the tiny URL to point to the new location. http://tinyurl.com/62dn9 gets you here too.)
Why don't we embed a unique identifier into each web page or searchable resource? As I have pointed out (also here), a search engine will always turn up the moved resource, eventually. Couldn't we use META tags to do that? Embed this in your file:
<META scheme="UUID" name="identifier" content="cce89bf0-92e6-11d9-9669-0800200c9a66">
Then a persistent link to the resource might be
http://www.google.com/search?q=cce89bf0-92e6-11d9-9669-0800200c9a66&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky
Hugh Winkler holding forth on computing and the Web
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