post on your own site

I have talked about the topic of owning your data in 2004, 2007, 2009, 2014, & 2017. In summary, I have promoted having a personal blog or website to initially publish any work, and then share it on various social media channels (controlled by someone else) as these come and go.

In 2014 I wrote a post sponsored by Cisco, on the ‘internet of everything’ (IoE) and owning our data. I said that the danger is that a few companies will have control of data factories and freelancers will become the product. As they say with social media, if you are not paying for the service, then you are the product. The IoE may increase the speed of automation, making more human jobs obsolete, as data become a capital resource. Will data factories become the new breed of middle-men while freelancers lose control? This could be a growing area of social and economic tension in the near future.

That future is here.

In a 2009 post on blogs as social media’s home base I created an image that is still pertinent today — contextualize what you see, create content, connect with others, and co-create with them.

Molly White has created [has referred to] a better acronym for owning your online data — POSSE = Post (on) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

Rather than publishing a post onto someone else’s servers on Twitter or Mastodon or Bluesky or Threads or whichever microblogging service will inevitably come along next, the posts are published locally to a service you control. At that point, the rest is simple (if not easy): plugging in whichever social media sites you desire, and syndicating the posts through them either by copying the post there directly, or publishing a snippet with a link back to the original source.

I did not do this with Twitter and I don’t practice POSSE on Mastodon. Instead, I publish my Friday’s Finds to summarize what I found online that was interesting or informative.

Whatever your practice may be, owning your data and publishing on your own site are good long-term strategies. I started posting here in 2004.