Take back your life and own your own words

Here’s a New Year’s resolution suggestion for you.

By all means keep using facebook, twitter and google+ to chat with people, meet new ones and keep up with old friends. But for goodness sake, when you have something real to say- something that needs more than 140 characters- don’t stick it on a site owned by someone else.

Just go and buy yourself a little corner of the internet and put your words there. It isn’t expensive and, provided you don’t try to fancy things up too much, it isn’t hard to keep it going. I used Blacknight, who are good and based in Ireland, for hosting and I bought my domain name from them too. You use whoever you like.

The thing is, you see, I don’t think the internet is going to be uninvented any time soon, but various companies come and go. If you’ve been salting your words away on, say, Google+, ask yourself what you’ll do if and when that flops and goes the way of Google Buzz. And that’s Google. Who at least are richer than Croesus. I use Tumblr to host my Nesbit’s Children blog- but it is my fond dream that its final form wouldn’t be online, so I also have a copy of it in Scrivener along with additional links and background material. If and when Tumblr winks out of existence, I’ll have a copy of everything ready to repost.

I say if and when a company or service winks out of existence, but really, given the endless waves of innovation and destruction that characterises the technology sector, I ought to just say when. More than once this year I’ve been struck by how handy it is to have a single site to search for all my old posts and articles. I’ve been able to send out links which are close to ten years old, confident that as long as Tuppenceworth.ie is up, my words will be available on the same URL. As time goes on, I am increasingly aware of how important that becomes.

So, I think you ought to value yourself and your thoughts. They are, in part, the story of your own life. Buy some space for the price of a Starbucks gut-stretcher beverage a month, take back your life and own your own words.