This is a brilliant idea. I know nothing about the programming side of this, but as a content creator I would absolutely use something like this. There’s a little voice in my head that is always bugging me to create a comprehensive back up of all of my work that is out there, but I wouldn’t even know where to begin, much less be able to find the time to do this. Even just downloading all of my existing podcasts to my hard drive feels overly daunting to me. I’m excited to see where this goes.
Richard – this is a critical issue you’ve been thinking about for a long time. Originally I think you’d thought about self-hosting your original content to protect from services that deleted your content. A big concern of not self-hosting is the funding of the infrastructure that would house the content. Since people would have different quantities of storage, it would almost have to be a subscription-based service at a new arm of a company like Dropbox or something similar wouldn’t it? If it were advertising supported, they’d probably restrict content. It would be nice if it were funded more like a Wikipedia model. If your team could even develop the mechanics to easily drop content across platforms into a storage site it would be a huge step in the right direction. A concern I would also have is that some platforms that currently host content might have legal restrictions on copying content from their servers…even if you created it.
It’s pretty cool. I don’t know that I’m totally wrapping my head around your idea. So, like, the program would track down any blog post and podcast I’ve done and store it for me? How would it be abel to distinguish between content I’ve created and stuff people have said about me on blogs?
I think as a longterm podcaster (audio not vlogger, although I do mashup videos and some vlogging type videos) this is a really good idea – it’s hard to keep track of all the content, across all these sites.
One thing to think about is what about an alert for ‘endangered’ content – you know, the hosting is up, the service is shutting down, etc. Half the battle is knowing – could this help in any way? Kind of keep track of all your content but also let you know if it’s at risk. Obviously the safest is collected in one place, but you might not want to do that until that service goes away…this might not be possible, I dunno. Some heads up on these systems going bye bye would be great though.
But even as backup system it would be useful…thought of some time moving away from Libsyn, I probably have the files locally but it would be nice to ‘takeaway’ those files just in case I don’t. Also a way of maybe comparing files? So you can point the tool/app/whatever and do a ‘rsync’ (a Ubuntu tool) type comparison and only download/sync the ones you don’t have? That would be a great help…if it could point out ‘you don’t have this one locally’ or something.
As much as a photograph has internal file info and a copyright which lasts for perpetuity, so other digital media should be treated in exactly the same way.
This is not so much as technical feedback, more support for your idea.
It’s a brilliant idea, and much needed. I have lost a lot of stuff, some of which was arguably part of technology history (because of the people in it, not my filming!). And I’ve spent a lot of time downloading, uploading, looking for stuff on various antique hard disks…
With blip deleting people’s personal videos, this is a great idea. Seems like YouTube and the Archive seem to be the last men standing. Online storage is cheap these days too. So many of the technical issues we had in 2004 are gone.
Do you have any idea how you would identify your videos/audio across the web
This is a brilliant idea. Im surprised no one thought of this before. I have been posting photos on various websites now for almost 10 years. I have so much stuff out there I lost track of it all. These days i’m much more selective about what I post and where I post it. Im really trying to post the my propriety work on my own website whenever possible. I try to post low resolution (to avoid theft) files on social media sites. Would it be possible to also scrape the files once you locate them? That would be awesome!
This sounds like a great idea. Technically, all doable provided there are APIs on the video-hosting service side that give you enough to suck the content off their servers so you can store it somewhere else, whether that’s self-hosted or something with cheap bandwidth like Amazon S3.
I guess the challenge is writing all the glue. Old school services typically have great APIs, but the new ones can be a bit shabby. That said, there’s only so much value in a 10 second Vine clip.
Presenting all that content as a portfolio should be a breeze with HTML5 these days, but you could just as easily do something like create an RSS feed and let other content management systems such as WordPress or Drupal import it. And then Dave Winer will tweet your shit, guaranteed.
This is a brilliant idea. I know nothing about the programming side of this, but as a content creator I would absolutely use something like this. There’s a little voice in my head that is always bugging me to create a comprehensive back up of all of my work that is out there, but I wouldn’t even know where to begin, much less be able to find the time to do this. Even just downloading all of my existing podcasts to my hard drive feels overly daunting to me. I’m excited to see where this goes.
Richard – this is a critical issue you’ve been thinking about for a long time. Originally I think you’d thought about self-hosting your original content to protect from services that deleted your content. A big concern of not self-hosting is the funding of the infrastructure that would house the content. Since people would have different quantities of storage, it would almost have to be a subscription-based service at a new arm of a company like Dropbox or something similar wouldn’t it? If it were advertising supported, they’d probably restrict content. It would be nice if it were funded more like a Wikipedia model. If your team could even develop the mechanics to easily drop content across platforms into a storage site it would be a huge step in the right direction. A concern I would also have is that some platforms that currently host content might have legal restrictions on copying content from their servers…even if you created it.
I think this idea is timely!
It’s pretty cool. I don’t know that I’m totally wrapping my head around your idea. So, like, the program would track down any blog post and podcast I’ve done and store it for me? How would it be abel to distinguish between content I’ve created and stuff people have said about me on blogs?
I think as a longterm podcaster (audio not vlogger, although I do mashup videos and some vlogging type videos) this is a really good idea – it’s hard to keep track of all the content, across all these sites.
One thing to think about is what about an alert for ‘endangered’ content – you know, the hosting is up, the service is shutting down, etc. Half the battle is knowing – could this help in any way? Kind of keep track of all your content but also let you know if it’s at risk. Obviously the safest is collected in one place, but you might not want to do that until that service goes away…this might not be possible, I dunno. Some heads up on these systems going bye bye would be great though.
But even as backup system it would be useful…thought of some time moving away from Libsyn, I probably have the files locally but it would be nice to ‘takeaway’ those files just in case I don’t. Also a way of maybe comparing files? So you can point the tool/app/whatever and do a ‘rsync’ (a Ubuntu tool) type comparison and only download/sync the ones you don’t have? That would be a great help…if it could point out ‘you don’t have this one locally’ or something.
Richard,
As much as a photograph has internal file info and a copyright which lasts for perpetuity, so other digital media should be treated in exactly the same way.
This is not so much as technical feedback, more support for your idea.
Hope all’s well Stateside?
Stu
It’s a brilliant idea, and much needed. I have lost a lot of stuff, some of which was arguably part of technology history (because of the people in it, not my filming!). And I’ve spent a lot of time downloading, uploading, looking for stuff on various antique hard disks…
This is potentially a business.
Thanks all for the feedback!
With blip deleting people’s personal videos, this is a great idea. Seems like YouTube and the Archive seem to be the last men standing. Online storage is cheap these days too. So many of the technical issues we had in 2004 are gone.
Do you have any idea how you would identify your videos/audio across the web
This is a brilliant idea. Im surprised no one thought of this before. I have been posting photos on various websites now for almost 10 years. I have so much stuff out there I lost track of it all. These days i’m much more selective about what I post and where I post it. Im really trying to post the my propriety work on my own website whenever possible. I try to post low resolution (to avoid theft) files on social media sites. Would it be possible to also scrape the files once you locate them? That would be awesome!
This sounds like a great idea. Technically, all doable provided there are APIs on the video-hosting service side that give you enough to suck the content off their servers so you can store it somewhere else, whether that’s self-hosted or something with cheap bandwidth like Amazon S3.
I guess the challenge is writing all the glue. Old school services typically have great APIs, but the new ones can be a bit shabby. That said, there’s only so much value in a 10 second Vine clip.
Presenting all that content as a portfolio should be a breeze with HTML5 these days, but you could just as easily do something like create an RSS feed and let other content management systems such as WordPress or Drupal import it. And then Dave Winer will tweet your shit, guaranteed.