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Digital Treasures: guard them wisely
Posted: July 27, 2010 (03:23) under Backups, Intellectual Property, Security

Buckingham Palace Guard

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.

And of course, as always, back it up!