Ownership and control

I read a great post today that explains why we should take the own­er­ship and con­trol of our con­tent we put on the inter­net.

Dis­cov­ered in this tweet, Redesign­ing Waxy, 2016 edi­tion is a great read.

If you don’t have time to read the full post, just read these two para­graphs:

Last week, Twit­ter announced they’re shut­ting down Vine. Twit­ter, itself, may be acquired and changed in some ter­ri­ble way. It’s not hard to imag­ine a post-Ver­i­zon Yahoo sell­ing off Tum­blr. Medi­um keeps piv­ot­ing, try­ing to find a suc­cess­ful rev­enue mod­el. There’s no guar­an­tee any of these plat­forms will be around in their cur­rent state in a year, let alone ten years from now.

Here, I con­trol my words. Nobody can shut this site down, run annoy­ing ads on it, or sell it to a phone com­pa­ny. Nobody can tell me what I can or can’t say, and I have com­plete con­trol over the way it’s dis­played. Nobody except me can change the URL struc­ture, break­ing 14 years of links to con­tent on the web.

It is still hard for me to pub­lish to my blog first and every­where else next. I shared the orig­i­nal post first in a tweet, and now writ­ing this post. I’m try­ing hard to get over this habit.

I archive my pho­tos to OneDrive, Flickr and Google Pho­tos. All these ser­vices upload my cam­era roll with­out me hav­ing to do any­thing. It is con­ve­nient. But there is a risk that any of these ser­vices can shut the door on my pre­vi­ous mem­o­ries with lit­tle or no notice. I real­ly have no solu­tion to this. I will keep think­ing.