So I didn't want this blog to become abandoned, and in fact I have several items throughout the last weeks that I have felt worthy of blogging about and have not. I think I just need to discipline myself to post my thoughts when I have them and not "I'll do that later".
But yesterday when I heard CBS bought last.fm (and being a last.fm user) it got me to thinking and motivated to post this thought. I have just been bought... along with my data. Will CBS keep it, take it, toss it out? Indeed if you look around I have relationships with Google, Amazon, Last.fm, Digg and other sites. All this data is valuable to me and what might happen to it in a merger, take-over, bankruptcy?
Do we need a Federal DATA Insurance Corp.
I had this thought a few weeks ago when talking to Josh, regarding my use of Amazon S3 to backup my data. I was looking at various on-line data backup sites. There are many and for my small amount several I could get free (add supported). However, I liked the Amazon S3 due to it's use of services and quite frankly the size and apparent strength of Amazon.
We began talking about the amount of data a person has on the net. I have data I would call valuable with Google (mail, RSS, this blog and a bit more), Amazon (data via S3) and Yahoo (they own del.icio.us now).
However, if any of these were to go away what would happen to my data? Gone? It got me to thinking about the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Established to provide some assurance that money (or at least some) would be safe.
Though the analogy is obviously not one to one it does make me wonder if there isn't some general consumer SLA that needs to be established with on-line data "deposit" sites. A Federal DATA Insurance Corp. to provide the public with some level of trust, confidence that data stored on-line in places like Flicker, MySpace, S3, Google, etc are retrievable when/if a company goes south.
