My City was Gone
I have blogged several times about my fear of consolidation. The perils of entrusting your data to entities beyond your control are numerous.
Recently, centralized systems have been in vogue - because they are easy to flip. You create a service, build up a captive audience, and sell your audience.
Recently, actKM an Australian Knowledge Management group, lost their Yahoo!Groups group. Apparently, Ii just disappeared and no one knew where it went. A 1500+ membership of active participants have lost their community history, their mailing list, their previously identified address.
For an on-line community, this is pretty close to having a hundred tornadoes erase your city. They've learned and have set up their own mailing list on their own servers. They can back up their own data now. They have control.
Imagine now that this was a service that managed your identity. Perhaps it was any of the numerous centralized systems out there that hold account information, your contacts, etc.
Recognize that if you are using a centralized service, that you are still the only one who is truly responsible for your own information. My blog is on typepad. I trust Typepad. But I still export my blog entries periodically to have a backup for myself.
I can't do that on del.icio.us. If my del.icio.us tags disappeared - I would simply have no tags. There are many such sites and that scares me.
Peer to peer systems with strong user authentication would entirely remove these issues. You are your data, you should retain control.
>> Nancy White's piece on actKM.
T: peertopeer p2p tagging yahoo actKM online communities
Photo courtesy of Morguefile and Noel Clark.
You can fetch the RSS feed that del.icio.us generates for you, and store that data locally in an aggregator or other feed-aware app.
Posted by: Roger Benningfield | 29 January 2006 at 21:32
That's true, I have feeds from many del.icio.us tags - not just my own. And I can also do one just for del.icio.us/ourfounder - but that's just raw RSS and doesn't offer me the functionality of a real tagging system resident on my machine. Plus, once I have that feed I can't do anything with it other than read it. I couldn't even upload it back into del.icio.us if they lost my data. So it isn't a real backup.
Posted by: Jim Benson | 02 February 2006 at 08:45
Good way to put it. I have been feeling bullish on the future of p2p. I envision a home PC that also acts as a web server with any of: blog/webmail/photo/document/voip hosting. It would ensure privacy and control.
Posted by: Sid Steward | 10 February 2006 at 17:26