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End of Yahoo 360 blogs: The perils of trusting corporate sites to store your data. And how about the URL issue?
May 30, 2009 | 2:48 am
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By David Rothman
For some months now, we’ve written of the plight of the Yahoo 360 bloggers—an illustration of how “corporate” and “permanent” often don’t jibe with each other. No ideology commentary here. That’s just the way it is.
In the grand scheme of things—yes, I’m exaggerating a little for effect—your posts may have the lives of fruit flies.
Now Yahoo has announced that “Your blog on Yahoo 360 will no longer be available to you.” Not just for new posts for continued access? The good news—kudos to Yahoo!—is that you can move your blog to another Yahoo site or even to WordPress.com. And the bad news? Well, I can’t say for sure, but I doubt that Yahoo will redirect every bleepin’ URL from your old posts.
Speaking of the permanence issue, I still can’t get Odeo to retrieve the audios that David Faucheux, a blind librarian blogging for TeleRead, recorded over the years.
Fruitfly image: CC-licensed by Mo Kaiwen.
Related: DataPortability Project. Not sure if Yahoo is a participant. If not, it urgently needs to be.
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Comments:
I don’t think bringing this up in this way is exaggerating the matter at all. The thing is, a lot of people really don’t care about how transitory online services can be… and these are the overwhelming masses the companies are really playing to. Unfortunately, there are plenty of people who don’t understand that fact, and don’t know how to independently secure or backup their content… they are the ones who get screwed.
And the problem is not limited to blogs, as those of us around here realize. Pretty much any electronic data that you store in one place exclusively, and especially a place you have no personal control over, is likely to be lost sooner or later.
I don’t see this as a condemnation of services like Yahoo’s, however, as much as it is an urgent admonition to independently backup any important data you have, so you can move it to another location if necessary, and you won’t be screwed like this. And if a service does not allow you to independently backup your data for use elsewhere, you should think thrice about using it.
And obviously, e-book enthusiasts should heed this advice…