Last month I asked a family member about their digital photos and whether they had them backed up. They replied, “Of course. They’re in the cloud.”
I followed up with another question.
How would you feel if you lost access to that cloud account?
Upset, they replied.
That’s what I thought, I said.
And commented I believed it’s not good to rely on cloud services alone.
Cloud services are not forever.
I suggested my family member look into backing up their photos locally. With multiple copies.
And pointed them to relatively inexpensive (less than $100 US dollars) portable hard drives.
This week, when I read Memories Can’t Wait—or, How I Learned to Keep Worrying About the Web, it reminded me of my conversation with my family member.
I nodded my head at Jeffrey Zeldman’s words:
The web was supposed to be decentralized, resilient, a network of nodes that could route around damage.
But in practice, we’ve spent the last decade centralizing our lives into a handful of walled gardens, each with its own exit strategy and its own definition of “forever.”
I know the feeling when a shiny new platform launches, one with all kinds of great features for posting content.
Like many others, I joined the crowd, created accounts on shiny new platforms, created a big following, and found my community.
Only to be caught in those walled gardens when platforms closed (Posterous and Storify).
My experiences and frustrations led me to write about owning your own content.
And how you own and control your content when you publish on your own domain.
Similar to gardening, where you grow plants in your own garden.
A garden, like the web, grows when it’s cared for.
