Have you ever sent an email or posted something to someone else’s Facebook wall or to the comments section of their blog and then thought, damn, I shouldn’t have said that! Of course you have: we all have. If you haven’t posted something you later regret saying, you haven’t posted enough!
The question is, what do you do then?
You get over it. In some cases you can “withdraw” an email, but the sad fact of the matter is that this fails more often than it works, particularly in an instant-alert culture where people open their emails on receipt. You can email the blogger and humbly beg them to take your comment down, but if it happens to be a swipe at said blogger, you’re probably only going to make the situation worse. And you can delete your Facebook account, but if you posted something to someone’s wall, you have to delete it before you delete your account, otherwise you are well and truly hooped.
The moral of the story, boys and girls? While we are all about backing up your own material, we advise taking a deep breath before posting something to a region of the web you yourself do not control. As comfortable as you may be in the blogosphere and the Facebookosphere, it’s pretty much always a mistake to drink and comment.
And speaking of which, when you’re tempted to drink and dial, it’s probably best to avoid those with Google Voicemail, otherwise you could find your slurry imprecations forwarded all over the internet as mp3’s. Get yourself one of these drunk dial blockers and never wake up wondering what you have to regret again!
You’ve probably heard about this “terrific” new Twitter feature called Lists: you can arrange those you follow into groups like “People in Vancouver,” “Family and Friends,” “Colleagues,” “Wise People,” and “Dipsomaniacs.” This is a great thing: for Twitter.
My suggestion is somewhat different: instead of giving Twitter the pageviews when you painstakingly organize a list of people whose streams of thought you find List-worthy, put it on your OWN site, and put that page URL in your Twitter profile. Twitter does not need the pageviews, trust me.
This is an extension of the oft-repeated dictate to Own Your Own Land: put the things that you work on in a space that you control, so that not only do the rewards come directly to you, but nobody can take them away from you by, say, suddenly getting sold to a shadowy oligarch who shuts off that feature or perverts it somehow.
Mercury is the god of communications, rogues, thieves, and social media gurus
Normally, you’d think backing up your data was a safety precaution, akin to flossing your teeth, eating right, and looking both ways before crossing the street. Normally, you’d be right.
But what about when you and your existing site have to part ways? What if your web host goes under, leaving a big hole in the internet where your site used to be? What if you want to move to another server? What if your DNS starts PMSing and your website is MIA?
Your backups can be your guarantee of freedom and mobility.
If you have an up-to-date backup, you can relax. Okay, you can pour yourself a stiff Diet Coke and THEN relax, because you haven’t really lost anything; it’s just temporarily offline, suitcased, and you can put it anywhere you want: new address or old. Once you get your new web home, you can simply upload your old contents and you’re up and running! Try re-creating a lost website from traces left on Google Cache and the Wayback Machine and you’ll never again forget to do your weekly (or more frequent) backups!
And yes, sadly, that is the voice of experience talking. If you’re not the detail-oriented type, you can always have a qualified professional take care of it for you. Now, gee…where would you find one of those?
We’ve discussed the monolitic data mining system known as “Facebook” before. Let’s discuss it again in light of the recent change in “privacy” settings and subsequent public outcry. I think this about sums it up.
Facebook Privacy
People know that when they post information about themselves to a website they and the website are bound by the user agreement that they signed during the registration process. The problem here is that Facebook (and several other sites to which you should similarly give the side-eye) reserves the right to rewrite their side of the contract at any time. Maybe they’ll actually tell you; maybe they’ll expect you to have Techcrunch on your RSS reader and check it hourly.
Remember: this is a service contract. It’s true that you pay nothing in cash, but you are giving them precious information which they then use to make a significant amount of money. Look at it as a consumer would, for that is what you are. Weigh the tradeoffs and realize that even though there’s no cash exchanged, there is a significant cash value to your information as far as Facebook is concerned, which is why they do not charge you for the service. You are entitled to bring critical intelligence to bear on the issue.
I still have my Facebook profile, one Facebook Group, and two Facebook Pages, and it’s unlikely I’ll join the so-called mass exodus on May 31 (we’ll see how many of them really delete their profiles; nobody wants to get left off a birthday party invitation list!). But it is similarly unlikely that I will actually trust Facebook to keep my best interests at heart, or even keep my settings.
Don’t even THINK your mother won’t see what you said about her.
We’ve ranted about Facebook before; its inflexibility, its unreliability, the fact that Viggo Mortensen won’t Friend u- oh, never mind that last bit. We’ve hardly even gotten started on the privacy leaks, and it’s a good thing, because they’ve just made them much worse. Fortunately, there’s a useful little tool you can simply add to your Bookmarks that will tell you where your Facebook profile is vulnerable; it’s called PrivacyScanner, and it’s from ReclaimPrivacy.org.
Here’s what it says about my personal profile:
secure Instant Personalization is currently sharing personal information with non-Facebook websites. you are opted-out of the Instant Personalization feature
secure – all of your personal information is at restricted to your friends or closer
secure – all of your contact information is at restricted to your friends or closer
secure – all of your friends, tags, and connections information is at restricted to your friends or closer
This isn’t particularly related to backing up or protecting your data, but it is awesome. Those of us in technical fields can often take the technology for granted and fail to see the fact that it really is life-changing if it’s designed well and gotten into the right hands.
Those would be this woman’s hands.
I didn’t get the point of the iPad at first; in many ways I still don’t. It just feels like the Segway, something about which we’re all supposed to become uncontrollably excited, but which isn’t game-changing for anyone.
iPhad convert your iphone into an ipad
I was thinking too small: the iPad is game-changing for those with visual impairments. People like the 100-year-old Virginia, who had never used a computer before. Watch and see the Digital Revolution in action.
A simple reminder that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Learn from the mistakes of others; as the wise blogger said, you must learn from their mistakes, as you will never live long enough to make enough of your own. You can even learn from my mistake at Diary-X, where I lost a good, solid 400,000 words of blog; that’s FOUR BOOKS WORTH. Did I trust the guy running the site? You bet I did: Steve was a great guy. Did he back everything up? Of course he did.
And he didn’t.
He’d subcontracted the backups out without really reading the fine print about just what was being backed up. It turned out that he’d been paying to back up the technical specs, not the actual blog contents. When the server went kerflooey, you can guess what happened to the thousands of people blogging there: wailing, and the rending of garments.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=f328a54c-d79e-4c81-ae28-cadf34df0f28)
