An interesting discussion on owning your own content, ironically hosted on a private beta third party discussion service.
Gina Trapani, on maintaining control as future-proofing legacy:
For me, publishing on a platform I have some ownership and control over is a matter of future-proofing my work. If I'm going to spend time making something I really care about on the web--even if it's a tweet, brevity doesn't mean it's not meaningful--I don't want to do it somewhere that will make it inaccessible after a certain amount of time, or somewhere that might go away, get acquired, or change unrecognizably.
Anil Dash, on preservation of culture:
I don't presume that my work is particularly important or worth preserving, but we lose a great deal of cultural documentation when our default bias is towards disposability. There are lots of people who are creating important parts of culture, but are doing so on platforms that default towards throwing our creations away. This becomes particularly acute when we realize that folks like MG, who've been paid to create these works, can't even count on their works living on.
Will all of the Instagram/Posterous/etc... content still be around in a decade or three? Will they wind up being better archives than self-hosted stuff that disappears when executors stop paying hosting renewals?
via Owning Your Own Words – Is It Important? - Branch™