What holds a lifetime’s work together if it isn’t in physical form? One thing is for sure: you can’t rely on Google
Dick Pountain is editorial fellow of PC Pro. After finishing this column, he needed a dram of Caol Ila. Email dick@dickpountain.co.uk
Internet culture was once expected to join the whole world together, and in some ways – such as email – it still comes closer than any previous technology. However, in other ways it divides us up into radically different camps and silos, especially when it comes to publishing one’s own multimedia content.
This thought occurred to me recently when I finally succumbed to curiosity by opening a Substack account. I’d been hearing about this service for several years, as used by many people whose work I read, so I decided to put up some of the material from my existing Blogger blogs and website.
My first impression was deep confusion, greater even than that I feel on Instagram. Substack combines a blog for publishing new short material with a website for long-form essays, an email distribution and publication system, plus a system for getting paid. Gazing at its opaque UI, it suddenly flashed on me how many places I now have my own “stuff” online, most of which don’t pay anything at all.
I generate content in the following media: text, like this column you’re reading, plus book reviews for other print publications; pictures, photographs and digital art; and music, some computer-generated, some played, some just curated playlists of other musicians’ work.
I currently keep text online on Blogger, Medium, Substack, OpenDemocracy, The Political Quarterly and several smaller publications, plus a book published in Amazon’s Kindle store. I have photographs online at Flickr, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr and my own website. I have music on YouTube, SoundCloud, Bandcamp and my own website, plus hundreds of playlists on Spotify and YouTube. That makes at least 20 different places with different addresses and logins, some with payment systems – which only generate any revenue if I spend to advertise.
I also maintain my own website, dickpountain.co.uk, hosted for free on Google Sites and plain in both appearance and features, although I did recently port it to Google’s New Sites standard. It contains a few short essays on computing, music and politics, but largely exists as a hub from which to access all those 20+ other repositories. My SEO skills are modest, so people are more likely to arrive at them
