Geoff Muskett. Blog.
A personal scrapbook, where I post progress on current projects, scribbles, code snippets I've found useful, maybe a photograph or two, and anything else web / graphics / art that I find inspiring.
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Who owns my content?
Sunday 7th August 2011
I’m a fan of tumblr, but a couple of things have been bugging me for a while. I started a tumblr blog as an easy and quick way to get content out.
This was before I had a website, and I physically didn’t have time to build one. It’s been great, a social network meets a blog platform. Really simple to use, easy to customise if you know HTML and CSS.
Getting content out onto the Internet for everyone to see has never been easier, and with iPhone and web apps it never been more convenient. This is brilliant thing, yes it’s noisy but there’s so much great content at our fingertips. The people I follow on tumblr and other places inspire me on a daily basis. It’s easy spend all your time viewing rather than creating.
Having said all that, it doesn’t quite fit my bill, here’s why…
1. The ikea approach.
As a web designer, it’s always felt a little wrong to use a hosted blog platform to share my work and thoughts. it’s like a carpenter finely crafting bespoke furniture for his clients, then buying flat pack ikea products for his home. The trouble with this ikea approach is that you’re constrained to the fundamental structure, yes you can paint the constructed piece but the underlying construction is rigid. For example if you want multiple images with thumbnails you can’t achieve this on tumblr. Tumblr is brilliant for many people but for web designers, it’s flat pack furniture.
2. Who owns my content?
Once I’ve posted something it’s uploaded and stored on tumblr’s servers. I have no control of it after this point, what happens if the founders of tumblr decide they’ve had enough and close tumblr - would my content be deleted forever? And if tumblr has the right to do that, does it mean they own my content? This happened recently with geocities. Yes there are some archives of the once thriving community, but much is lost.
Adam Ostrow’s TED talk after your final status update got me thinking about this. Adam talks about a blog post by Darren K Miller, a journalist who unfortunately suffered from cancer and died. He arranged for a member of his family to post to his blog after his passing, the post written by the journalist is entitled “the last post”. His blog is now essentially an archive and part of his legacy. I don’t know the platform Darren K Miller used, but if it was blogger, tumblr, or any of the others then I fear his archive will not last forever. Geocities lasted 14 years. A long time in Internet years but no time in terms of life or generations.
I wonder if tomorrow’s family hand-me-downs are no longer photo albums or journals, but databases of social media, blog and other online interactions. Perhaps hCard microformats will evolve and have a central place where all your Internet activity can be viewed and downloaded to keep for future generations to see.
Whats next? The irony of this blog post is that it’s written on tumblr! In time though, I’ll migrate to a self hosted wordpress blog. Still posting to tumblr for it’s social network side, but wordpress will be my central activity hub. This will give me full control of the layout of the post, and more importantly control of the content once it has been published so I can back it up and store it, and save it to look back on in years to come.
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