Own your own content

One of the housekeeping issues I need to fix on my site is fixing my presentations…

Once upon a time, SlideShare was the go to place for hosting presentations. It was a great idea, worked really well and allowed you to share and access presentations from conferences you couldn’t attend & in the process learn so much. But then it became more popular (with I’m guessing increasing running costs). With this popularity came advertising. Then there was more advertising along with reduced functionality, or to be more correct, functionality only available if you became a paid member. Then the final straw, it got bought by LinkedIn. Now LinkedIn is one of those services that never provided any benefit to me at all. Endless emails, worthless recommendations and it just became creepier and creepier. So, despite having an account with them that was essentially inactive – you often sign up for things as it’s a good idea at the time & it might prove to be useful – I decided to remove myself from their system (it’s a story in it’s own trying to rid yourself from their system). Doing this also meant deleting my SlideShare account as a: I wanted out from that company & b: the SlideShare of now, was no longer the same SlideShare I signed up for.

It wasn’t a decision taken lightly. I had embedded presentations in this site. Others had embedded my presentations in their sites or linked to my presentations.

Personally, the presentations I’ve given have been some of the most rewarding activities I’ve undertaken in my professional life. Taking this step broke everything. Links were gone, embeds were gone. There was no record anymore of my work. I’m so sorry.

The web was once a great place to create a distributed identity for yourself. You could host images one one site, videos on another, presentations on yet another site and easily bring all of this back into one place. This is still the case, but it’s come at a cost. The cost is advertising. Your content gets top and tailed, or overlayed with advertising that you have no control over. Privacy policies get changed. I’m over all that. It’s my content. I want to control how it’s delivered and presented to the world.

It’s time to own my content again.

So I have some work to do on my site to migrate all my presentations back to their rightful home – here. Even though many of them now are dated, they are still me, they have helped to define my career. I need to do the right thing by them.

I could take the easy option and just put a PDF of them up, but I know there’s better ways of doing it than that. I know what has to be done. I just need to do it. I’ve already started the process by changing the hosting of a few explanation videos I’ve used in posts to be served from this site rather than embedding them from YouTube.

Stay tuned as I rebuild my digital presence right here.