This blog is a neglected blog

So have a picture I made:

Clouding Over?

A few articles I’ve read recently (including the odd horror story) have led me to consider the level of personal risk I am accepting when I keep all my data in the cloud.

Recently I was stung by the sudden demise of I Want Sandy, a free online application somewhere between a fictious P.A (the eponymous Sandy) and a to-do list manager.

At the moment my life is managed somewhere between Google Calendar, Google Docs and Toodledo.I suppose I’ve also got to give a passing mention to Facebook and of course there is the Twitter obsession of my previous post. The thing that concerns me is that if I lost access to any of these systems (for whatever reason) I’d be up the proverbial creek.

Perhaps paying for a service would give me greater security (and hopefully better helpdesk support) but the truth is I don’t need to. I can afford to fork out $25 a year for a Remember The Milk pro account, in the great scheme of life that is peanuts, but the problem is I don’t have to. There are number of apps out there offering basically the same thing for free. I’m no Scrooge, but at the same time I’m no fool.

What about you? Are you concerned about the amount of your data that you store in someone else’s servers?

On Twitter

I noticed, to my genuine surprise that my Twitter post count was hovering around the 1,200 mark. Considering the only reason I joined was to update my Facebook status at work (where Facebook is languishing behind the content-filtering curtain). I’d heard of a widget that would update Facebook via Twitter and saw a work-around.

The irony? I’ve all but forgotten about Facebook now. Twitter has become, in an incredibly short space of time, a massive part of my day to day communications. I don’t work in a terribly lively office, certainly not compared to some of the e-commerce startups I’ve been involved in. I think Twitter fills the techie-banter that is missing from my day. My partner, for all his virtues, is not interested in technology, not in the way I am. Not in the obsessive, detailed way I can all but salivate over the latest gadget or program.

I’m not a social media junkie, although Twitter has been a gateway drug to other sites such as Delicious. I’m pretty sure I’ll be mainlining Linked In, Ping.fm and Tumblr by the end of the month.

Is there a rehab for Twitter addicts?

I blog therefore I am

I read blogs, I read blogs almost obsessively. Google Reader is my drug of choice. But every attempt i’ve made to keep my own blog has fallen miserably out of the gate. I don’t know why, perhaps I try to shoehorn my blog-attempts into a category – rather than “This is my blog” it’s more like “This is my blog about…”, and I don’t think I ever settled on what ‘…’ was going to be.

So here we are, hopefully if I can stop myself trying to categorise, label and file too much I might actually begin to enjoy this process. I have a lot of thoughts, most are mundane, perhaps some are even a tiny bit significant, who knows. Perhaps putting them down and words and sentences might help me figure out which is which.

Anyway, until next time I bid you adieu