Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Another Year Gone By

Wup: missed my own anniversary, yesterday — with Google Blogspot. Nine years, and counting. Somebody please cue Bedrock's finest.

Funny: I recall being nervous when Google acquired Blogspot shortly after I started posting. I can't recall the specific reasons why, though I think the move insinuated the potentially transient nature of hosting. If Google decided bloggers weren't generating income, we might all be done for, our “intellectual content” (such as it is) vapourized like so much skywriting.

I still try to maintain the attitude that this content is transient. But man oh man: nine years, without crashes or, really, any significant blips. For a couple of years I ran another blog off my own web address, with the generous tech help of another friend. The back-end assaults were endless, and grew exponentially by the week. Type that address into your browser and you'll get yet another 404 screen. Not so the bright orange banner with white lettering. So far as I'm concerned, Google deserves an award for nine years of incomparable service — all this at no fiduciary expense to yours truly.


3 comments:

Cowtown Pattie said...

we're getting long in the tooth,Yabba Dabba.

Joel Swagman said...

Just passed my own 9 year anniversary as well. I agree with what you say here, it is disconcerting that someone else has the power to pull the plug on my blog at any minute, but so far google has been really good to us. Not only have they kept it running, they've kept pace with technology. blogspot can do so much more stuff than it could 9 years ago. I just wish I knew what their long term business plan is. There's no adds on my blog, so how are they making money off of us?
Regarding your previous post--as someone who has some nostalgia invested in Carl Barks, but hasn't read him for about 20 years, I am really looking forward to seeing your take.
Also for us non-technical folks, what were back-end assaults? Does this refer to hackers? And what were they trying to do?

dpreimer said...

"Yabba-dabba-tooth," -- eh, Pattie?

Joel - I'm not sure what the hackers were trying to do, but I imagine they could have used my site to launch spam bots/phishing lines. And speaking of spam, that was another plague. The filters had to be constantly updated to deal with the latest "advances" in spam technology. I was relieved to mothball that project.

As for Google, their whole scene is information aggregation. Whatever content you contribute as a user generates a pattern of global activity they can track and analyse -- or simply report on, for other people to analyse. Whether you post this content on a Google page, or Wordpress, or a site you build and maintain on your own is immaterial. But if Google provides the platform, it makes the aggregation and analysis (and content control, where/if needed) that much easier.