Whoa, instead of just lamenting the shutdown and how talent acquisitions are horrid, and how VC's won't do the right thing and companies like Twitter are killing innovation (you might believe these things to be true; that doesn't change my point), these guys (Jason Scott and the Archive Team and jacquesm) did something about it. And when Jacques couldn't do it himself he organized other people.
My favorite kind of leadership, and an example of the (double-edged) sword of instant communication: people can be rallied around time-sensitive causes, like SOPA or posterous shutting down.
I know this seems a little obvious, but it's striking how rare it actually seems to be. I'm curious why. Maybe it's just my perception and it's happening all the time. Certainly people are doing great things, but I'm curious why we haven't yet seen more specific, directed actions like this. Does it depend on relatively homogeneous communities like Reddit (SOPA) and HN (this)? If there is a proliferation of such communities, say subreddits or otherwise, could we expect this to happen more frequently? Do we want it to happen more frequently, or do we run the risk of, say, DHS running a pro-search campaign like China's 50 cent army? I'm just curious about why this seemed so striking to me.
This also fits in with an article I'd been meaning to read by Fukuyama[0] on social capital written 15 years ago.
The vice of modern democracy is to promote excessive individualism, that is, a preoccupation with one's private life and family, and an unwillingness to engage in public affairs. Americans combated this tendency towards excessive individualism by their propensity for voluntary association, which led them to form groups both trivial and important for all aspects of their lives.
Perhaps we'll see more of these spontaneous actions as voluntary associations are easier to make as the infrastructure that supports them (e.g. reddit) becomes more well known and fine-tuned.
As someone who spends reasonably large amounts of money on digital media buys, I've found that most companies like Twitter (though actually I have no experience with Twitter, except as a user) certainly are a lot more friendly when you have money to spend.
Fun story about Facebook: when I first wanted to start spending decent amounts with them (decent not huge - $10,000s/month) a few months ago I literally could not get in touch with a single person. Even completing contact forms I wasn't hearing back from them. A friend who used to work for an SEO/SM company told me a name of someone to contact, I used LinkedIn's InMail (a paid feature) to message him, and 24 hours later I had 3 account managers (including a technical expert, a media strategist and an overall account manager), who answer calls to their mobiles at any time of day. Now I have a nice route to get answers on any topic, not just paid advertising, thanks to my spending. (Was actually shocked about how hard it was initially to make contact and give them money, too.)
Well I personally wouldn't have found out about this effort if not for this post of yours, so you certainly deserve some fraction of the credit in my book :)
(I have everything up and running according to your short guide and am working on the posterous project, though my contribution will probably limited to under 100GB due to bandwidth cap considerations. Btw, how much disk space does posterous in its entirety take?)
I can assure you that you will not use up very much space nor bandwidth :-) It's mostly text and all. Feel free to stop by the project IRC Channel which is #preposterus on EFNet for specific questions (if they aren't answered in the FAQ or HN thread already)
jacquesm's a member of the ArchiveTeam now by the way ;-) And so are you, since you're helpin'!
Archiving content is one thing but to able to use it again is another.
We are helping users move to tumblr & save their blog. So far moved 500000+ posts (mostly small blogs). But we are not able to help all the users who have multiple images and videos in a post. Currently we support only single image & audio posts. If we can find a way to host their files separately on S3 permanently, then the move would be effortless & many would thank.
There are so many users who don't understand what to do with their backup, for them moving to wordpress is too complex task.
I have reached out to Sachin aggarwal, but yet to hear a positive reply. Tumblr also rejected to host the files of Posterous blogs.
We are ready to collaborate with anyone who can host users file permanently, if needed users can pay directly to you. We were also considering dropbox for hosting files. Moving to new blog platform is a pain and we wanted to minimize as much as possible.
Got all the answers I need here (though I might drop by the channel to say hi). It's actually quite funny to see the traffic graph spike as it makes a successful connection, then lulls for a while as certain pages keep giving 502 responses. I definitely see why you guys need IPs more than bandwidth!
I'd say the reason it doesn't happen more is because it takes a ton of work and people are mostly self-involved. Activism is not what it once was (in the States anyway).
I wish more actions like this would happen, too. I'm glad that they at least happen. The technology to share work is there, and here's work that might be overshadowed at times, the BOINC project: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ . Use your unused CPU cycles for the greater good.
My favorite kind of leadership, and an example of the (double-edged) sword of instant communication: people can be rallied around time-sensitive causes, like SOPA or posterous shutting down.
I know this seems a little obvious, but it's striking how rare it actually seems to be. I'm curious why. Maybe it's just my perception and it's happening all the time. Certainly people are doing great things, but I'm curious why we haven't yet seen more specific, directed actions like this. Does it depend on relatively homogeneous communities like Reddit (SOPA) and HN (this)? If there is a proliferation of such communities, say subreddits or otherwise, could we expect this to happen more frequently? Do we want it to happen more frequently, or do we run the risk of, say, DHS running a pro-search campaign like China's 50 cent army? I'm just curious about why this seemed so striking to me.
This also fits in with an article I'd been meaning to read by Fukuyama[0] on social capital written 15 years ago.
The vice of modern democracy is to promote excessive individualism, that is, a preoccupation with one's private life and family, and an unwillingness to engage in public affairs. Americans combated this tendency towards excessive individualism by their propensity for voluntary association, which led them to form groups both trivial and important for all aspects of their lives.
Perhaps we'll see more of these spontaneous actions as voluntary associations are easier to make as the infrastructure that supports them (e.g. reddit) becomes more well known and fine-tuned.
[0] http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/seminar/1999/reforms/fuk...