Spun

[Some thoughts in preparation for an upcoming tech conference.]

I’m a lot more interested in exploring the ways that users can host, remotely access and futureproof their own data on their own hard drives with free software that uses open formats than yet another Web 2.0 app that requires yet another login and yet another place to store bits of yourself on the web.

Yeah, user-generated folksonomies and tagging and Ajax and syndication and mashups have their advantages and sure, I’m excited about the ways that a web browser can be so much more than a document reader. But do I want to live my whole computing life in a browser? Frankly, no. Do I want all my data hosted on other people’s servers all over the place? No.

Why?

• I want to take my stuff with me, into the future and into places that don’t have internet access.
• I want to search across my documents and data stores and connect my ideas, without being dependent on third party services to do so.
• I want what I do with my data to be limited only by my imagination and not the API’s, Terms of Service, functionality and server uptime of some random company. (This is why I lasted 2 months using Blogger back in 2001.)
• I don’t necessarily want my data branded by a company or advertised against in ways I can’t control.
• I hate identifying myself with services. It’s like wearing a tee-shirt with a Nike swoosh on it. del.icio.us? Geek. Flickr? Hipster. Plaxo? Biz person. Bloglines? Info junkie. Gmail? Early adopter who knows someone with an invite. And so on.

I still prefer my text files and my own MySQL databases to anyone else’s, and I’m not sure why I’m so alone in that sentiment.

Do I have COBS (Cranky Old Bastard Syndrome)? Or are the money people just getting to the “gee whiz” bit of all these technologies so this crap is just springing up everywhere? Why don’t any of my compatriots seem as concerned about this as I am?

I suppose I’ll just sit back and keep writing my open source shell scripts and automating my backup plan and trying to resist another rounded-corner, drop-shadowed, yellow fade social thingamagig that I can give away my life to, in wasted hours and personal data.

Long live the Google text ad.