Okay so I think I’m beginning to get in a habit of writing on this site. Which is good because I thought it was an issue. I spent some time over the past two nights dusting off another site. That site is relatively easy to find if you were looking for me on the net from real life. It’s harmless enough. Some organisations I guess it’s encouraged or easy to maintain a personal web presence. I’m sure it is in mine. We have a lot of courses you can go on to ensure you’re managing your web presence correctly believe it or not. But in my case work is not my life. I like having separation, and as I mentioned in the previous post that includes people I know in real life outside of work.
 
I checked out my old domain out of interest earlier. It’s moved from Russian spammers to Japanese spammers now. I don’t think I had that great a page rank back in the day, nor did I have a really sought after domain name so I really must have pissed off some spamming groups back then That gives me a warm feeling. I do remember being on an exclusion list for some of those groups. Seriously, they had “Do not spam these domains as it’s a hassle” lists. Ah good times when grepping server logs was entertainment o_0
 
That was also when I ran x86 systems and had to worry about firewalls, intrusion detection and antivirus. Good lord I do not miss those days. Purely UNIX (okay OSX) at home now so if one machine get’s infected it’s MBH or my fault.
 
It’s becoming an old adage now that if you don’t want other people to see things online then don’t put it online. I’m not sure I agree with that completely. I think a bit of common sense and care is all that’s needed. I also think that people really just don’t think when online. I know people on Facebook who share the most crazy things, but when you meet them in real life they are the quietest people you’ve ever met. Having a conversation with them is like getting blood out of a stone – yet when online they are unleashed!
 
Facebook and Twitter have certainly capitalised on that. For want of a better phrase it’s capitalising on ignorance. But a lot of these social sites business plans are advertising. I still can’t get my head around some of the $20-$100 billion valuations of some of these companies (expected if they IPO). I think in simple terms. When on earth has an advertising company been worth that much money? But what it boils down to is the access to YOUR data that is the valuable thing. Twitter doesn’t concern me as much as Facebook. I look at the Facebook strategy and it turns my stomach, whereas with Twiiter – well not much of a strategy right now.
 
I wonder if any of these social sites will be around in 10 years though? Or will they go the way of Friends Reunited, Myspace and Bebo.  Not sure I have the answer. If I did, whatever money I had I’d be investing. They do feel to me like they are the pinnacle of social sharing right now though. In the same way that Google took the lead in the search area. Ah, Google. I remember when I first tried them after moving from Yahoo! That must have been back in 1999. I still use GMail and Google Reader but I’m not sure I trust them with anything else.
 
One of these days I may figure out how to store my RSS feeds in a number of places (Dropbox?) then all I need is a reader that can access a stored OPML list rather than rely on a service. Email is another matter. I’ve had the Gmail address for too long now, and just can’t work out how to move away from that reliably. Which is crazy as storage is so cheap nowadays. I remember when 1 Gig seemed like a lot of space. I have 2 terabytes on the home network right now and another 20 Gig in offline storage of various kinds. Nevermind my shared hosting which is ‘unlimited’.
 
I’m a clever lad – there must be some solutions I can come up with