Background

In around 2007, I took the plunge and started a Twitter account. I had been blogging regularly for about four years and in fact the DigitalDarragh.com website was over seven years old. Twitter was a way for me to engage with other bloggers, talk to readers and drive more traffic to the site. It served me very well up until about 2013. But from then on I began drifting away from it. From aroudn 2010, Facebook started to catch my attention and I posted more and more on tha tplatform. It was less about driving traffic to digitaldarragh.com and more about connecting with family and friends. But in 2016, that too changed. Facebook started to become a music networking platform. Suddnenly I had over a thousand friends on Facebook most of which I wouldn’t recognise if they said hello on the street.

My primary online social media activity for the past six or so years has been centered around these platforms and although I have huge concerns around privacy on Facebook and I dislike the bullying on Twitter, they have served a need.

Realization

That said, something has tipped the scales for me. I used to post audio to Audioboom, video to Youtube and then the normal social media stuff on either Facebook and Twitter. But recently, Audioboom has decided that it’s in effect shutting down as a consumer service. This was a brilliant audio podcasting network and because it’s not finantially viable, it’s leaving content creaters high and dry by deciding to remove that functionality. Facebook, Twitter and other social networks could at any moment do the same although currently, it’s not likely. But what it has reminded me and highlighted is this content that we post is often very personally significant It’s not just ours in terms of intellectual property or even owned by us personally in terms of some kind of limited copyright. Social media platforms own that data, text, picture, video or audio as soon as you post it to their servers but they can also share it, delete it or misplace it without many or any repercussions. So take Facebook for example, they could decide that retaining ten, twenty or thirty years of video isn’t finantially viable and therefore place a retention period of five years on it. But these are often your memories so fifteen years later, a memory that might have been really important to you that you want to look back on may no longer be available. Again, this isn’t the current reality, but there’s nothing stopping Facebook or any other platform doing it just like Audioboom has.

New years resolution? I hope not.

At the start of each new year, dead blogs that have been neglected for ages often hold promises of more content. This promise has certainly been made here a few times but this year will likely be different. I’m moving back from social networks such as Twitter and Facebook and I’m posting the things that are important to me here instead. This may result in shorter more frequent blog posts, more video, more audio or longer posts containing all forms of media. I really don’t know. Let’s see how it all works out.

Techy stuff

For now, you may notice a few test posts going up while I work on more effective ways of delivering video and audio without eating all the bandwidth on the server.

To prepare for this new bout of blogging, I’ve dusted off the site, given it a brand new coat of paint and taken a sledge to the old server. It’s now on a shiny new system with more RAM, more CPU cores, better disks, more bandwidth and all round greatness.