Mastering your domain

Christian Crumlish

Shelley Powers has done some thinking about how to make it possible for all webloggers to publish to domains they control, and has come up with some principles:

1. Hosted services support domain pointers. If your service can support something like yourweblog.blogspot.com (or yourweblog.typepad.com), it can support a unique domain name for the weblog...


2. Hosted services and all weblog tools support the same permalink format, or allow the person to set the permalink format....


3. Keep a backup of your weblog entries. All weblogging tools, hosted or not, should provide a backup mechanism....

No one service, no one government or organization, and especially no one person should have the power to arbitrarily make another person's writing, weblog or otherwise, disappear.

Now that ups the polemic a notch. I don't know if that's a law so much as an ethic, a principle, a - whatever one item in a manifesto would be called - manifestocule?

Plus, I'd tighten it up to "No one organization, and especially no one person, should arbitrarily make another person's writing disappear."

Frankly, a law about what power people should have would be less useful than a law about what people should not do, regardless of whether they have attained the power to do it. You can't file off all the toggles or tie up people's hands.

I hereby label Shelley's corollary Powers' Corollary, or Powers' Corollary to Robbs Law of Weblog Hosting in full.