Comments on: A Digital Ownership Society

By: Althea

Althea — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 03:08:26 +0000

hey chad
i just wanted to say hi
hope youre doing well
-Althea

By: mcarper

mcarper — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 18:09:56 +0000

MySpace is probably the worst service to trust with anything. I saw a list on the GenMay forums a few weeks ago that had over 20,000 compromised MySpace usernames and passwords. While most of the victims were only subject to MySpace vandalism, some had the same passwords for their paypal accounts, so yeah, that would suck.

This Gmail incident definitely makes me want to back up my stuff, though thats really the only online service I use to store things.

By: Julian

Julian — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 01:33:44 +0000

As great as Gmail seems, I still haven’t considered using it as my primary e-mail account. I have been signed up with an e-mail provider for over a year now (for less than $3/month), and I just trust that more. I like having all of my e-mail locally accessible.

That reminds me… I should back up my Thunderbird profile.

Isn’t e-mail supposed to be dead, anyway?

And then there are all those tens of millions of MySpace accounts. The extra content (pictures, videos, music, etc.) that people put into their profiles, the content that can practically define the profiles, can be in tons of different places (because it has to be — MySpace only hosts images, with some restrictions), and can disappear without a moment’s notice. Would this be an example of an ephemeral digital collage? Personally, to borrow an overused phrase, it is what it is — personal web presence. What a MySpace profile is not is a true web site. I agree that digital ownership goes beyond the content — it also encompasses the control over the format and presentation.

I don’t have a blog yet (I blame lack of content). If/when I start one, I would definitely go with an open source solution (or just build the whole thing myself).

Another thought. Give it to the masses, and they will use it. What would happen if you take it away?

Back to basketball.

By: Chad

Chad — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 01:22:02 +0000

I enabled POP access to my gmail account, and then configured Outlook to connect to it. I let Outlook download all the mail from my Gmail account (this took a bit), and now I have it all on my hard drive.

By: Courtney

Courtney — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 00:44:09 +0000

How, exactly, would one go about backing up a gmail account?

By: Adam

Adam — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 15:55:23 +0000

I hope you don't consider this spam, but a good option for dirt cheap (literally) hosting is www.nearlyfreespeech.net. They have a funny little chart here that shows just how much their average customer pays per month. Since establishing my account with them last November, I've paid a grand total of 22 cents, and the reliability has been rock-solid. I need to back up my Gmail account as well. Everyone thinks "oh, it can't happen to me," but then it does!