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| the cloud | 2010-02-02 21:32 UTC |
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wow - I haven't done a tech post in months...
I started this blog almost 6 years ago, and I was definitely late to the party with regard to blogging. I'm still doing it "old school" - using a largely obsolete perl program (blosxom) and hosting on my own (leased) server, where I have root access and directly control everything. I can back up (or not) as I please, and, without a court order (or breach of contract), no one can really shut down my stuff except me - not that they'd want to (or care enough to think about whether they'd want to). I've participated in more mainstream social networking sites/services, and they've been great - I've reconnected with people I thought I'd never touch base with again. A friend of mine from Omaha with a lot of energy cajoled everyone into signing up on friendster, and many old friends have had myspace pages for a while. I resisted facebook until another Houston friend talked me into it maybe a year and a half ago. Then I got my wife to sign up - more goodness all around. I've been reluctant to *do* much with the accounts on these services, though. It occurs to me that I don't have nearly as much control over the content that I create there as a practical matter, irrespective of what the applicable terms of service are (and they may or may not be all that friendly themselves). If this box blows up I can either a) restore somewhere else from backup or b) kick myself for not backing up regularly enough, but not so on these services, and of course, not so with any sort of "cloud computing" resource. I even resisted webmail for years, but finally caved and started using gmail (it's been a while now) - have you ever been locked out of gmail? I have - just for a few hours here and there - never sure why, and google won't tell you - they just quietly re-enable after some time. My guess is that there's an automated shoot-first-ask-questions-later sort of bot, followed on by a human review, which corrects its mistakes. When you're locked out, your stuff is gone... Google has an initiative to make it easy to back up information from their cloud - the Data Liberation Front - kind of old news - caught my eye immediately, but did I follow up? nope.. I will now, though. |
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