A day or two ago I wrote a post here on The Inquisitr that called into question the sanity about relying too heavily on letting our workflow exist too much on the web. The idea being that between the slowly vanishing VC money to established giants in the industry; like Google, taking steps to solidify their base of web applications that can; or could, broaden their economic base. The idea came out of a post that I had read by Steve Rubel and I thought it had some valid points to make – so I wrote them .
I ended off the post with this
Personally I have been reluctant from the beginning to move my workflow to the web mainly because of things like this. One minute you might be using some service as part of your workflow and the next minute – Whoosh – it’s gone; usually with nothing more than a week or two notice on a blog somewhere that no-one probably reads. I may have gotten laughed at in the past whenever I questioned the long term viability of trusting our workflow to the web but over the next year I don’t think those people will be laughing quite as hard
Now the interesting thing was the amount – or should I say the lack of traction the post got. Other than a few comments on the post itself and a couple of FriendFeed it died the ignoble death it seems that my get in your face cranky type posts get. In other words it went nowhere as far as being a discussion starters. In contrast his original post that I extrapolated on saw a minimum of 45 comments.
Then today Mr. Rubel has another fine point except that for some reason it sounded a lot like what I had already written – at least in the subject idea or concept. That being the questionable reliance on established or new cloud based applications – gee it sounds similar. As Steve said in his post
This is exactly why I won’t invest time or energy in a lot cloud-based apps today like Remember the Milk or Evernote . Yes, both are awesome and they have income. Evernote got funded and has paying subscribers. Remember the Milk too charges for many of its best services (like its iPhone app). However, I suspect many stick with the free versions – especially nowadays. And that could be problematic in a year or two if things continue. The good news is that these sites make it easy to sync or export your data.
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My advice to everyone is look for high ground. Think hard about where you store data that you care about. If you don’t care about the information, then you’re fine.
So to all you new bloggers and those working their way up the ranks the next time you think you have an original idea or thought don’t hesitate to write it down in a post because that is why you are in this profession after all. Just be realist to know that there is very little chance your probably very good post will see the same kind of traction as when someone like a Rubel, or a Scoble, or GigaOM writes up basically the same idea.
As much as the whole blogosphere likes to pat you on the back with sweet sounding platitudes the reality is that your post won’t even break the surface of the blogosphere that swoons around the big boys of the A-List.
