Photo of local morning glories by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N8 camera phone.
Tues 07.12.11 – Today was a good day that started with a lovely and fun UX interview with Thomas Mann on Skype video. We had a good chat about mobile devices and travel. I love talking with good sharp, designers as their minds can leap from place to place and connections can be made. Thanks to Thomas!
And then Jeremy linked to Brian’s conversation over at Google Plus about owning one’s own stuff versus engagement in the here and now on whatever is the big right now online service.
I have been a proponent on this blog and in person of owning your own stuff on the internet for years, even during the boom years of 2005-2008 when everyone thought that the services and Web 2.0 would take care of everything and your data would persist no matter what. I had several memorable conversations in that time period with a few prominent tech folk about how we can’t trust a company or online service with our data as we don’t know when they will lose funding or lose interest or be sold off to folks who will turn off the service and what we will do about our data when this happens.
As the business cycle waxes and wanes, as companies furl and unfurl, I want to own my photos, my text, and my data. Not only do I want to store my data where it can be seen by the world, but where I pay the bill and can freely upload, download, and back up with ease. For me that has meant paying rent on server space and a domain name since 1999 and having duplication / triplication of backup both to a physical hard drive and a cloud service on top of my server space that this blog lives on, in addition to all the spaces and services that I participate in online.
This blog is my studio, gallery and reception space, as well my living room of which you are all invited to. I may visit many places online and some of them may be second homes, like Twitter, but this space is where my heart lives.
Where does your online heart and home reside? Do you have full, partial or no control over your online home? Do you care?
What happens if you don’t want to own your own self-hosted blog, will more projects like Jaisen Mathai’s OpenPhoto crop up that will allow all of us to share our data to online services but also have all of it backed up to our own accounts at Dropbox or Amazon S3?