who’s a publisher, who’s a journalist, who’s responsible
Clay Shirky’s very interesting book “Here comes everybody” deals with journalism and journalistic protection etc. In large; now that anyone can do what only a few could way back, definitions are changing. Accountability too. This is kind of interesting in relation to that. The JournalSpace drama where the blogging platform was messed up by an employee. No back-up. Here are tousands of people, who’ve blogged for quite a while, who don’t have their writing anymore. Hmm. Imagine if that was a newspaper or “professional” publisher. What’s happening here? I think I’ll export my wordpress posts a la xml more often. That’s a good thing to do. Take it into your own hands, if you’ve taken publishing into your own hands.
The blue screen of death.
Did all the people who blogged at JournalSpace pay for the service ? Of course not - so, we really can’t expect them to provide such a service. Is there a method in place to enable someone to easily back up their blog ? I know Googles blogger does;
http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=41447
Lessons learned !
You’re right. The way it’s always worked is if you don’t pay for it, you can’t expect it to work. I guess. But considering the number of services we use today that we don’t really pay for, I wonder how well that works. WordPress has back-up I know, because I use it my self. Surely Type Pad does too. And BlogSpot I know. Nice to have the power to do it yourself.