I read a ton of blogs. Some of them are written by my close friends, for their close friends. Others are written for the public and discuss general topics. The latter are usually written by experts in a field.
I think the personal blogs are a dying breed. If you look at myspace or facebook, they provide functionality similar to what most blog platforms provide but add a ton of other perqs like photo management, games and toys, networking tools, and more.
I’ve been debating what to do with this site for many months. More of my ‘updates’ are going to facebook than here because that’s where my friends spend their time. When I update this site, a status link automatically propagates ‘down’ to facebook…but most of my readers are now either coming through RSS feeds or through a facebook click. (For you random people who get here through Google or Wikipedia, hi there!!!)
It takes work to keep this site running. It would be very easy to decomission the website, leave the email running, and just use the tools that facebook provides.
What do you think? Should I let this site spin down? Should I worry that facebook ‘owns’ content that is stored on its servers? Should I worry that facebook will one day be obselete and I’ll have no way to ‘migrate’ my content to the next-thing-to-follow-facebook-and-myspace?
3 Comments
Hi Matt — If you have any concerns about losing the accumulated content, then I’d strongly suggest keeping stuff of import here. At least until FB or someone comes up with some way to back up content.
For me, it’s about context. Facebook is very, very public; when I put something on it, I’m “telling everyone”: my friends all get informed. The atmosphere is light, ranging from humorous through newsy to banal. There’s room for high emotion and evangelism, but not too often.
By contrast, the subscribers to my blog (there aren’t many) are conditioned to expect a little more intensity from time to time. They’re mostly people I know well enough to allow candor.
This is not to say I don’t want my Facebook friends reading my blog; on the contrary, I’d like them all to stop by and check it out. And leave if it’s not to their taste. For me, it’s worth it to maintain two semi-overlapping networks.
I use Blogger for my blog which is the support page for the applications I support. The real trick for me is finding content I actually care to write than where I stick the content.
If your poring your heart out to the interweb and you want to remember your healt-felt rhetoric for every, then I suggest your keep your own site along with your own DR plan; otherwise, Facebook along with Flicker should be about everything you need to publish the most minute details of your life to the world.
I do however think Bakaits.com is a cool domain.
Post a Comment