The Future of AudioBoo is Uncertain - A Reply to @Documentally
By @edent
· audio audioboo decentralised · 3 comments · 150 words · read ~234 times.
My good friend Documentally has written up his thoughts on the future of AudioBoo.
Here is my reply, appropriately enough, in audio format.
🎤 Terence Eden
You may be interested in my other posts on the subject - Preparing for the Collapse of Digital Civilization and I Don't Want To Be Part of Your Fucking Ecosystem
(So, yes, still trying to find a decent WordPress plugin which will take multiple files and display only one player. Also need to find a less manual way of uploading and converting. Hey, it's not bad for 10 minutes work, ok!)
Extracting Your Data from the AudioBoo API
I have been very concious of services just vanishing over the years and even keep a backup on my own data (yes, I had almost my tweets before they were available) and use a domain under my control when I can. The problem with wanting everyone do to this is two fold...
First that is is not easy for the masses and even if we make it easy then it risk cutting the funding for the social services we know and love so they may fold or never exist in the first place.
Second is when the person who posted the data decides not to bother hosting any more. How much information has been lost as people have decided to close there blog? I only really realised how many friends have done just that when porting my blog reading from Google Reader.
Alistair
I think your second point is very interesting - and ties in somewhat with "the right to be forgotten". I wish I had an answer to it.
An interesting example here is Mark Pilgrim's "Dive into HTML5" book, which he made available free online. Mark closed all of his sites, specifically choosing to return a 410 rather than a 404 status code. The key difference here is that this link rot is intentional and you should delete your references to that resource.
Could 410 be formalized into a way of exerting your "right to be forgotten"? Practically, probably not, but it's interesting to think about!
The other point to note is that the community disregard the request and mirrored the book somewhere else.