Comments on: 2.0 or and bust

By: Judi Kercher

Judi Kercher — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 01:47:44 +0000

You’re absolutely right – we place too much dependence on third parties to keep our stuff. This was brought home to me recently after Yahoo! closed first its Briefcase site (where I’d placed several documents) then 360 and now Geocities. The loss of 360 is no big deal to me as I haven’t used it much. (Facebook has taken over.) But I had spent a lot of time creating a website through Geocities for my family history research. Now all that will be lost. Yahoo offers to transfer it to another webhosting service – but for a price. The safest place for all my stuff, I’ve decided, is at home, backed up.

I fear for my personal blog though – I should back that up too!

Thanks for a great post and timely reminder.

By: Dana Longley

Dana Longley — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:54:30 +0000

Thanks for highlighting this crucial issue! There definitely needs to be lots more thought by those of us that can’t afford or don’t have the tech know-how to host lots of data and services ourselves, into 2.0 tool evaluation and data backup plans. For example, if the tool/service offers a way to export your data (most stable bookmarking and blogging tools have this functionality, for example, but some like PBWorks force you to pay for it), think about working out a process to regularly export that data to one or more storage areas yourself.

I do that with our 5 year old library blog on Blogger for instance. And for my own Delicious links, I’ve switched to Diigo, but set it up to auto-add any new bookmarks to my Delicious account as a backup.

By: Aaron Tay

Aaron Tay — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:39:22 +0000

I’ve being thinking the same thing. Mashups are particularly vulnerable, when you pass through 2 or more 3rd party services.

When given a choice between various services, it’s sometimes tempting to go for the newest coolest service which tends to be the most innovative (say one of delicious competitors Iterasi rather than delicious), but personally I would probably stick with the most established ones.

But even this isn’t a guarantee, when you see Google canceling services, like google shared bookmark

Though you talk about services closing their doors, even a temporary disruption can hurt particularly if it is a critical service.

By: Stephen Francoeur

Stephen Francoeur — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:44:48 +0000

On a related note, Jon Udell has been encouraging people to join him in his elmcity project, in which people volunteer to curate calendars of local events and use his collection of web 2.0 tools (Delicious, Azure, Eventful, Upcoming, FuseCal, etc.) to aggregate these local calendars. This past week, one of those tools, FuseCal, which would scrape web sites and generate iCalendar feeds, appears to be on the verge on shutting down. In a post from 7 July 2009, Udell explains how he thinks the ecosystem of web 2.0 tools his project relies on will survive the loss of FuseCal's functionality.

By: Meredith Farkas

Meredith Farkas — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:15:50 +0000

I guess the big problem with PBWiki was for sites where you’re allowing multiple people to author and edit content whom you may or may not know. Before, you could just provide people with a key that they could use to edit the content. Then, all of a sudden, the method was changed, which required users to create accounts and request permission to access the wiki, which is cumbersome and may even prevent people from using it if the manager of the wiki is away from their email for a while.

By: Rebecca Blakeley

Rebecca Blakeley — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 04:30:47 +0000

Great post! I back up my delicious bookmarks about twice a month. You just reminded me to do it again before I leave for ALA.
I use PBWorks and used it when it was PBWiki. I haven’t had any problems with it for my GovGuides (Govt. Info. Research Guides) but was annoyed when they changed their name and urls seemingly overnight. I haven’t noticed any change in the look or settings so far.
See you at the Unconference in a few days!

By: Meredith Farkas

Meredith Farkas — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:53:58 +0000

I was thinking about your del.icio.us links myself, Stephen, when I saw your post. Good luck figuring out some way to make that work, especially considering all the great work you put into that index.

Thanks for the link! Looks like an interesting read (and how could it not be with such a provocative title?).

By: Stephen Francoeur

Stephen Francoeur — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:01:26 +0000

Thanks for the mention! One thing still remains to be done, which is figure out how to handle the index of posts in the reference blog. When we started using Blogger, you couldn't assign tags or categories to posts, so I started using Delicious to index them. There are now 1700 posts indexed in Delicious. Even though the new WordPress platform offers tags and categories, we're sticking with Delicious until I can figure out a good way to export those bookmarks (which link to posts on the old Blogspot version of the blog as well as posts on the new one) and incorporate them in the new blog platform. FYI, for a profane take on the dangers of overreliance on the cloud, see this post by Jason Scott on his ASCII blog.

By: Meredith Farkas

Meredith Farkas — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 10:47:18 +0000

Bryan, Grazr was actually the service that I mentioned having changed, as I had experimented with using it as a current awareness tool for faculty. Glad I didn’t end up implementing it! I’m sort of glad for these examples because they remind us to think more critically about the infrastructure we’re using to provide 2.0 services.

Matthew, it reminded me to do it as well, so I’m glad it at least benefited us!

By: Matthew Thomas

Matthew Thomas — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 04:11:28 +0000

Excellent entry. If nothing else, you just made me go backup my del.icio.us bookmarks (and tweets too, cuz I’m an idiot like that lol). Thanks!