A friend sent me a link to a recent post by Brad Templeton, Data hosting instead of data portability:

A data hosting approach has your personal data stored on a server chosen by you. (You might have that server right in your own house, or pay for hosting services.) If you pay, that server’s duty is not to exploit your data, but rather to protect it. That’s what you’re paying for. You can have more than one (with different personas, if you like) but for now let’s imagine having just one.Your data host’s job is to perform actions on your data. Rather than giving copies of your data out to a thousand companies (the Facebook and Data Portability approach) you host the data and perform actions on it, programmed by those companies who are developing useful social applications.

I find data hosting appealing and would like to shift towards hosting my own data as opposed to having my data hosted elsewhere. It's a matter of making it practical though.

For instance, I'm a big fan of Flickr because it makes it so easy to have my photos taken care of. But ideally, I'd like to host my own photos and directly control how people access them. I'd do that if I could build a good repository and layer services on top of them — just like Flickr. But Flickr has an economy of scale that I don't have — it can solve that problem and provide the solution to many people.

Now, it's possible that we can solve that problem too and sell and/orr share it to lots of people so that they can do more of their own data hosting. Is that a business that I would want to be in?

My Dreamhost-hosted sites are down again: DreamHost Status » Blog Archive » Spacey filer issues. Time to move? But where to go?

If I want to add SSL access to any of the domains I host on dreamhost.com, I will need a unique IP address, which costs an extra $4/month . Some threads on this topic: Re: Unique ip?

Since I use WordPress to display code, I'd dearly like to get the bug #3066 (backslash disappears in <pre>) fixed.

I'm glad to see the emergence of APIs in the scholarly/library realm: OpenDOAR – About OpenDOAR – Directory of Open Access Repositories and the corresponding OpenDOAR – Application Programmers' Interface (API)

I'd like to learn how to write a FireFox toolbar. Born Geek » Firefox Toolbar Tutorial is a tutorial that might help:

This tutorial explains how to create a toolbar extension for the Firefox web browser (specifically for version 1.5 and later). It provides an overview of how extensions are developed, the tools required to create an extension, and details on how toolbars are created. Please note that this tutorial is lengthy; I recommend spending time with it over the course of a few days (it makes for a good weekend read).

The online Barnes and Noble stor (barnesandnoble.com) uses ISBN-13 in the links to books. (e.g., RESTful Web Services) Amazon.com uses ISBN-10. Something to keep in mind to et LibraryLookup to work for Barnes and Noble.

Because I really dig Python, I perk up with any mention of free (?) Plone hosting, such as Objectis – Objectis Community