This one’s doing the rounds, but it struck such a strong chord with me that I want to give it its own post, rather than just linkblogging it.

Brent Simmons, on the relationship between blogs and “social media”:

My blog’s older than Twitter and Facebook, and it will outlive them. It has seen Flickr explode and then fade. It’s seen Google Wave and Google Reader come and go, and it’ll still be here as Google Plus fades. When Medium and Tumblr are gone, my blog will be here.

The things that will last on the internet are not owned. Plain old websites, blogs, RSS, irc, email.

At this point, I’m not 100% on “it will outlive Facebook”, I admit. I do live in the hope that it will outlive the relevance of Facebook, but at this point, I fear that Facebook and Google are IBM-like – they’re only going to fade away when we pass through another major tech boundary that significantly alters the something fundamental about how we use the internet, and even then, it’ll be a fade and a change, not an outright death. I suspect that anything big enough to do that to Facebook will also be big enough to obsolete this little blog.

But that aside: yes. I may be a control-your-own-data crank, but in ten years I’ll still be able to be here, doing this that way I currently am, if I want to be, no matter what decisions are made by some other company. That’s worth a lot to me.