Making a Web 2.0 Survival Plan
Social Networks provide an excellent way for publishers to share their work and connect with communities.
Sadly with the large firms of Google and Yahoo buying up social networking space it is critical to insure that your social networks are backuped so you can rebuild them if you are suddenly deleted. This recently happened to Gail Orenstein. Without explanation or warning Flickr deleted her popular network that contained connections to thousands of fans. So how can you protect yourself in a climate of Global Corporate Censorship?
Well this method has been proven under fire.
1. The key is to have as many social networks as possible. Don't keep all your friends on Flickr or MySpace, but run a Flickr page, a couple of Blogger blogs, and a MySpace. Doing this prevents you from being exposed to a single network.
2. Gail and I also backed up all the text and contacts from Flickr in to a number of Google sites using Blogger. This is done with an excellent tool called Flock Browser. Flock Browser lets you drag and drop any content in to a web blog tool that will blog the content and styling to your own blogs.
In this case all the testimonials are dragged from the Flickr site on to the blog tool in Flock, press the publish.
You can define a set of blogs with public API to post to and add technorati tags. Flickr will alert Technorati that you have blogged an item for more distribution. Pressing publish again will blog the entire.
Now you have a full back up of your testimonials posted to Google, where it is also free of Flickr new filter system and can show up in Google searches.
Follow this procedure for comments on your photos as well. So in case Flickr deletes your site you can quickly make contacts with your old community and give them email message about. It might take an entire weekend but we were able to contact over 300 members of Gail's community in one night.
Within 24 hours of Flickr deletion Gail's site was back and she had over 20 new testimonals. We don't know what Flickr thinks of this, nor do we care. This method can work for any of your social networks you are concerned about, especially one's run by Yahoo which is promoting considerable censorship in an effort to capture the China market.
This method can give you a public record of your community independent of the company that presently may try and take it away from you. You can also use this method to save and distribute Wikipedia articles under threat of deletion you feel are important or would like to work on.
Flickr is a wonderful tool but the community is dominated by cyber-bullies and nut cases and the corporate culture is corrupt and pandering to China. So everyone with real art should start a blogger site, download Flock and make themselves safe.
With this method Gail had her site back and running, and most of her best contacts online in 5 hours.
Robert Hooker
3 comments:
wow!!!!!!
Fantastic!!
I was Hoping + Praying Gail had her shit backed up!!
Very Important to say the fucking least*
;))
I like a few other tips U've provided here as swell - to my mind it's the Comments by yer Friendz + Viewers on Flickr that are the most Valuable + as U pointed out the Testiclemonials too!!
I want to give it a try cuz my shit currently isn't being seen by the Outside Real World either + Flickr is becoming more + more like a Gitmo Prison with their Kangaroo Court & no means to defend yerself or even know what the charges are*
Flickr Fascist Pigs*
Cheers Gail + Bob!! Billy ;))
Peace*
I wont be happy until there is an *automatic* way to back up flickr, that also has a way to take the back-up and re-put it on flickr OR wordpress OR blogger.
sigh
Clint
Well given that Flickr is RSS based someone more clever than myself could probably write something in flock to do what I proposed in an automatic way.
My personal belief is that the network is the thing that needs to be DRed publically, along with a second web site on another provider with all the same content. Many of the blogs I manage are so automanaged.
Manual proceses take time but they do allow a very intentional creation of the DR, with social contact information stored in one blog and content in another, futher protecting the blogger from assualt by censorship.
Also blogger blogging each others work more will certainly help. Ideally you work would be so blogged by other bloggers that you could restore yourself through technorati.
Perhaps more effort by bloggers to blog material they are concerned is in danger of censorship.
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