
Fire in the Library - FluidDjango
http://www.technologyreview.com/article/39317/?p1=A1
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CodeMage
Why does everyone compare this kind of situation to a library being burned
down? Look, not everyone can go into a library, leave their stuff around and
expect it to be available to everyone else all the time, for free.

Not everything in the world is worth preserving. To be precise, it's not
equally worth to everyone. If you publish something that is of great worth to
you, it doesn't automatically make it valuable to everyone else.

What's reprehensible in this story is the attempt by Poetry.com to fight the
Archive Team. The rest of the stuff seems completely reasonable. Bear in mind
that the company notified its users. If you published something somewhere for
free and couldn't be bothered to keep your contact information correct, why
would you complain about losing the stuff you published?

~~~
jka
Broadly agree, although I would say it's hard to decide which artifacts will
have future value - many of the fascinating things about ancient Roman culture
come not from the great works of art, but from the basic bowls and tools which
people used to prepare food or for other daily rituals.

In the same way, future historians (or perhaps data archaeologists, to frame
it another way) might find a lot of value in the things we might consider
mundane or don't feel 'compelled' to digitally preserve.

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pavpanchekha
Perhaps I'm more paranoid than most, but I'm young, and I've seen services I
relied upon shut down several times. The problem, however, is that letting
users rescue their user-generated content /hurts/ the company doing the
hosting. Only a few companies, such as Google, let you actually export your
data; fewer let you keep it in active sync. But I wish more companies would
realize that the loss due to not boxing in your users is usually minor; and
the gain is also minor, _unless your site shuts down_ , which it likely will,
in which case an export feature is something you'll have to build no matter
what; better build that before-hand.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Google's user engagement model is to _send visitors away_ as quickly as
possible, in such a manner that they want to come back soon. The
Yahoo/Facebook model, on the other hand, is to create a big enough garden that
visitors want to stick around. The former model is not afraid of users being
able to extract their stuff, whereas the latter loses much of its value when
users can access their stuff outside the garden.

~~~
eCa
That was the old search-centric Google, not the Google of Gmail and G+ etc.

The more time you spend in Google's Garden, the more ads you'll see and the
more they are based on the data you bring into the Garden. They no longer want
you to leave.

~~~
gwern
I recently tried out the G+ exporting functionality; it seemed to work fairly
well for everything I had posted. (Not sure if it pulled my comments on other
peoples' posts - didn't check that.)

------
kiba
The internet is the world greatest printing press but it is also have a
tendency of having its content burn now in little fires everywhere.

It's like the Alexandria library copying only some of the work a lot of time
and then there are little contained fires on some unimportant books.

We are less likely to forget fundamental knowledge of civilization than to
lose pictures of our family.

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sdoering
I lost my content once, when a site, also related to poetry disappeared here
in Germany. As I was not using the email addy, I had used years before, when I
registered, I only detected the shutdown, as I was searching for one of my
texts and finding a "Sorry we are gone" site.

I was royally pissed and would have wished, that these raiders had this site
raided and torrented before shutdown.

