Posterous icon (Photo credit: dolphinsdock)

With the news that Posterous is shutting down, and users of the service have until April 30th to extract their posts from the service, once again I am glad of my own personal blog. Hosted by myself, I try to bring back as many of my online interactions to my site. If I post a thought, a quote, or an interesting story online, it goes to ewanspence.com, not the latest version of HurdlePile.

That's not to say I isolate myself from Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk. Anything posted on my blog will be linked to automatically with a post on these services, and there are more comments and interactions in the social networks than there are on my blog. You can't ignore them.

But you can be just a little bit paranoid about your data that you put on them. I want to have all my curated links, thoughts, observations, and other paraphernalia under my control. My own site means I have a 'master' list of my major contributions to the Internet.

If a social media site ever goes under, puts up a paywall to 'archive' content, or changes the permalink structure, it can leave the users of that service at a distinct disadvantage unless they have taken precautions.

My precaution is to have my blog drive much of my personal content to these services. When they disappear (or are bought up, absorbed into another site, and then switched off, which seems to be a popular option nowadays) I don't need to be particularly worried about extracting my content - it's on my own site; it's backed up on my own server; and the links to it will always work (even if I need to do redirection in the future).

Compare that to the situation that Posterous users are in. They need to be aware that the service is closing, they need to download their data in the format that Posterous thinks is useful; and then get it back online in some form. Even once it's back online it is essentially new content in the eyes of the internet, needing indexed, filtered, and linked to. That's no small task for me, and may be beyond other surfers.

The social networks rightly regard our data as something that is worth something to them. It's worth  something to me as well, and that's why I have my own vault for the originals.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2013/02/17/this-is-why-my-blog-is-better-than-posterous/
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