Beth Wellington‘s fact-rich blog on politics and culture, coming out of rural Virginia and opining on everything from polar bear preservation to E vs. P, has a new home at Blogger. But wouldn’t it be nice if the poet-journalist-activist could pick up the hundreds of older postings she wrote for Yahoo 360, which is shutting down? Yahoo promised to help Y360 users make a smooth transition, but after several months, they’re still in the dark about the specifics, and Yahoo PR is stonewalling me. Hello, Matt Warburton, Yahoo Community Manager? Care for an update of your October post, which has drawn thousands of comments?

I nominate Beth and the others as poster children for a new organization called DataPortability.org, which will strive to work with Net companies to help people gracefully move from host to host while keeping their data intact. In the case of blogs, the minimum for transfers would be texts, image and sound files, layouts within posts, blogrolls, internal and external links, tags, and, of course, visitor comments. Just what will Yahoo do to help the displaced 360 people? Yes, their posts are still up. But soon they won’t be able to make fresh entries, and who knows how long the older entries will last.

Social Media Guru—or Anti-Social Guru? I’d hope the former!

Perhaps Marc Davis, Social Media Guru for Yahoo Connected Life, can take a little time to investigate DataPortability and get Yahoo to join if it hasn’t already. More importantly for now, maybe the organization can immediately help Yahoo come up with the right tools to help Beth and the others. Without transition help for the Y360 people, Marc might want to resign or change his title to Anti-Social Media Guru. Just what kind of lasting connections can Yahoo help people make when their posts are ephemeral? I’ll be optimistic, though. He’s a former assistant professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information and ideally will be more attuned to the nuances here than the usual corporate types. As for his current employer, genuine data portability would be to Yahoo’s advantage. People will put more of themselves into posts if they know their entries won’t vanish someday into the ether. Hey, Marc—don’t take that subhead and the rest the wrong way. It’s just the TeleBlog’s way of helping you get the attention of Jerry Yang and David Filo or whoever can jar Yahoo into action.

Meanwhile I hope the DataPortability will catch up not only with MySpace.com, where many writers have Web outposts, but also with HarperCollins and other publishers that are setting up sites for writers. Google and Facebook are among the DataPortability’s existing participants.

Protecting your net.presence and Google-ability

Let me conclude with earlier advice. The best way to protect your net.presence and Google-ability is to have your own site with your own domain. I encourage TeleBlog contributors not just to do posts for us but to reproduce them at sites they themselves control.

Now playing at the Writing Corner: Comcast, the FCC and Net neutrality. Yes, I’ve added Beth to the TeleBlogroll (under “Other News and Views”).

Related: Robert Scoble’s video on the need for portability.

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3 COMMENTS

  1. We can control our own destinies to some extent.

    Never post a blog or web-based email or anything without saving it locally. For blog posts, include the date when you posted it.

    I use the mac-app Scrivener to save and organize all my blog posts because its organizational tools are great. TreePad for Windows and its imitator tree-based text editors make another fine choice. Or even TiddlyWiki, which will preserve the ‘tiddlers’ according to date created.

    Really, the bottom line: users can’t trust companies to continue to offer the same services forever. MicroSoft has changed the file formats of MS-Word many times, leaving old Word files unreadable; Google Video dropped out; and then there are all the old ebook reading devices with their online ‘libraries’ — once the company failed, the online library disappeared.

    DRM and copyright eliminate users’ ability to back up legally-purchased ebooks and videos, but we can certainly back up blog posts etc. that we create ourselves. And we should!

  2. Hey, Pond, thanks for the tips, and you’re dead on about the need to back stuff up. But remember, Beth and the other Y360 folks want the stuff in a format usable in a comprehensive way in another blog. And that means comments and other trimmings. Know of any tools that could do the job for her at Y360?

    Meanwhile I was pleased to see a MyBlogLog image from one Marc Davis. Same guy I mentioned in the post? Will be dropping him a note this weekend to see if Yahoo will be more helpful.

    Thanks,
    David

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