our content usually has a longer life-span than the services that host it

Brizzly is shutting the cave door, if you have uploaded any photos, you will have to download them.

Which reminds me, once more, that services go away all the time. A couple of years ago, I lost some videos when vpod.tv changed the services they used to offer (no, they did the right thing and sent me an email describing how to download my videos, but the timing was really bad for me and I didn’t do it in time). Oh, and remember google wave? Google video? Pownce.com? The list can go on and on and on…

Which is normal. We know that most of these services will have a short life-span. That’s how tech start-ups work. It’s expected.

But the thing is, our content usually has a longer life-span than the services that host it. I want my blog posts, my videos and my photos to be there in 10, 20, 30 years -and, why not, even longer. Flicker, Youtube, and the rest will probably be dead by then. If you hosted your first web pages on geocities, you probably know it.

What can we do? I think there are two directions we should pursue:
1. Use our own infrastructure.
2. Make it easy and legit for our content to be duplicated, copied and redistributed.