Oh, UserLand, where did my old blogs go?

Hey Scoble,

First comment for me here on your blog. Long time reader, first time conversationalist. It's about time that the blog community starts talking about interoperability and archiving. Some blogs definately merit preservation and there should be some mechanism available to archive or otherwise transfer historical posts between blog systems.

Tate

Damn! I lost mine too. They used to be at:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0103807/

I'd have gladly paid for a copy of radio annually to keep it there. They didn't ask. Sigh.

http://web.archive.org/web/20010220164649/http:...

That's good stuff. I really liked:

Did I mention that Winnov was funded by Sean Connery? Yeah, that one. It was weird when he'd call on the phone. The guy who got married (and subsequently became a father) due to my food poisoning was Sean's step son: Olivier Garbe.

I actually agree with you here. This is going to be a big problem for people in the coming years.

What can I say? I told you so! Userland Sucks!. By next week I will have gotten rid of Radio. I keep a whole copy on my site, but I imagine at some point the one in the cloud server will disappear. It would be interesting to know the inside story of what happened there, I remember the email from John Robb that got me blogging in 2002, I remember the email exchange with you that allowed me to buy Radio after a billing problem. I remember reading the notes of Dave Winer about little minutiae of using the product. It was great! then you all left one by one and it seemed like there was nothing left. The worst service experience of my life, when I started having problems with Radio last year and lost all my Google ranking thanks to them. I can believe the roller coaster ride from happiness (when starting to use Radio) to happiness (when I stop using it).

Same here, and to make it worse someone has my old login number! What a wasted opportunity - one email to me saying " Do you wish us to archive / upload your old blog for $x - I would have said yes - to quite an high amount, as well!

Bloggers and their historical archives, not. Heh. Too rich indeed.

Mine is gone at "editthispage.com".
If you get a reply, I'd love to hear from them too.

While it's certainly sad, it's always the user's responsibility to backup their data when they leave a service. I wouldn't expect MSN to keep my data forever (Hotmail deleting email, anyone?), why would I expect any different of another company.

Again, sad, and given the profile of many of the blogs that have been deleted and the history contained in them it's doubly sad... But I can't lay all the blame for the data being gone at UserLand's feet.

This sounds like a good reason to run your own Wordpress blog with the Wordpess Database Gackup plug-in.

Actually, shouldn't a Radio Userland blog user have a local copy? If I remember right, it ran on your computer then uploaded stuff.
(Of course, I wouldn't expect users to keep the local files around. All I can find on my machine is radiouserlandsetup.exe, but then again maybe I never tried to write anything with it or the file has some strange name.)

There is always http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://scobleizer....

?

The wayback knows all.

Maybe coulda used Box.Net? Hahhahahaha.

Yea, wayback would be cool if Userland hadn't decided to block their traffic... check the links

"Your crawler is hitting our servers too hard. Please slow down, it's hurting the service we provide to our customers. Thanks. webmaster@userland.com."

Dan

I lost my (free) one at editthispage.com too. I don't know if you can now, but I managed to download the .root file. I then with a free trial of Radio (and much hassle - see http://manypies.blogspot.com/2005/12/i-download... ) I got the entries out in a text file. I want to backload them into blogger, with appropriate dates in the past, but I haven't found an easy way yet. If anyone else has managed then I'd like to hear it!

I lost my blog on there two times . It pissed me off cause its the frist time I really wanted to write something . To just get things out I am not very smart when it comes to computers and how they work . It really does suck , I wish there was something I could do and be good at it .If you read the Blog you would understand . I have a story to tell and its a true story . I am Bi -polar its afight everyday I have my one little girl left .My boys have gone one off to College and one doesn`t want to come home .I miss him he only 14 yrs old my little girl is 12 yrs she is getting so big now . The only thing I can try to give them is love I hugand kiss her every day so she know I love her.I have a 1 bedroom apartemt so when they were both here they would fight all time.That is a god part why he left. I am sorry for going on . Aside from my kids I go on Facebook I have found some of my old friends mostly I make new ones .I don`t go out I can`t afford it .I have stopped cutting myself since I had the kids but I still think about it but I keep fighting for her and me . I was 17 when I frist got pregnant back than they still looked down at you for so young. I had to drop out of high school I`m 37 now and look at me .no one would want me my mom alway said stop feeling sorry for yourself and I would feel real bad but its the truth . well I stopped crying and all of this .Well I am sorry