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.