the big move: a cautionary tale

Cloud computing has its perils. One of those is analogous to renting vs. homeowning. In renting and in putting your documents on a cloud, someone else -- in the best case scenario, someone with more resources to to it well -- has the burden of responsibility of keeping your stuff safe.

But the landlord can choose to have the building torn down, leaving you to look for shelter. This is what is currently going on with GeoCities, the granddaddy of all web hosting services. As happens when an apartment is razed, neighbors scatter, destroying the community in which you once knew where to find people.

This could happen with any cloud service or application, including blogging, photo sharing (major brands Yahoo and AOL both recently stopped their free services), and yes, even online word processing. You could wake up one day to find that your documents are going to disappear. Or, if it's only the free service that's being stopped, that your stuff is being "held hostage" for money.

So, I have moved my former GeoCites sites.

Public Free Library, which includes links to free e-texts of books and documents, music, and a page of quotations is now at

http://pubfreelibr.100webspace.net/

Everallyn's Jefferson Pages, a Thomas Jefferson biographical site, is now at

http://everallyn.hostcell.net/