This week I'll be mostly blogging on the outside

Ctrl-X, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-X ...

If you're reading this (which you are), then you're on Blogger.  Blogger has been owned by Google for about a decade.

If you're paying attention (which you may be), you'll notice that the posts on this blog earlier than 2012 are suspiciously similar to my Facebook Notes.

If you're really paying attention (which you're not - I know this from the stats page), then you and the other two readers of this blog will soon realise that most of what follows has been suspiciously posted elsewhere on the interweb.

So why would I start blogging out here, when I had a perfectly good thing going on in there?  Well...

There's a bunch of content out there on the interweb with my name on it.  When one site in particular closed down and moved elsewhere, I was hit by the realisation that thousands of words of my own carefully crafted prose trivial nonsense, might just disappear into the great big recycle bin in the clouds.

If my stuff is not safe at the Beeb, then is it safe on Facebook, or - say - any site owned by Google?

I don't imagine Facebook and Google will be going out of business any time soon.  Having said that, back in the mid 80s I decided that I should record all my vinyl records onto cassette to make my music collection (a) more accessible, and (b) more future proof.  Yeah right!  Do I still have all those cassette tapes today?  Nope.  Am I still carting around a large stash of LPs and singles over a quarter or a century later?  Yep.

I am therefore convinced that neither backing up nor copying, neither external hard drive nor The Cloud, neither NAS or SAN, nor taping onto TDK D60s, nor converting to MP3, neither saving as jpeg or raw, nor printing out and keeping in a fireproof box in the attic, nor any other technology known to man, is able to save my stuff from total demise at some point in the future.

Ok, so I'm paranoid.  But just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

So, I've decided to keep my eggs in a number of different baskets.  And this blog is basically an exercise in cut-n-paste-ing words from one place to another in the futile hope of keeping them safe.

Welcome, then, to those of you who previously knew me as Researcher U1522321, or as Optic Nerve. Welcome, also, to any FB friends who may recognise some of the rambling here. And to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.