utterliI am always cautioning clients about putting their content on sites like Facebook.  When Facebook wants to, they can delete everything you’ve put years into creating.

This struck home hard this week as I was tweaking the RSS feed for my podcast here on RWTWD.  I found something was not working so played around until I fixed it and now it is up and running smooth again on iTunes and other places.

I noticed however, that a stretch of shows I record from October of 2008 through March of 2009 were no longer available.  I dug in and found out that this was during a brief time when I was using a service called Utterli in conjunction with my Blackberry.  It allowed me to take a short video and record audio that was posted automatically to my feed and went out as a regular show.

Apparently, Utterli is utterly gone… kinda like Blackberry.  With that death came the end of those files… lost forever.  It was only eight shows, but it is still a loss.

Every other show I have created has been stored on Libsyn and backed up regularly by me.  (Yes, I did find a couple of instances where the file on Libsyn was missing or corrupt so that backups really helped.)

Pay attention to where you post your content.  I made the short-lived move to Utterli because I investigate new things and it seemed a tad easier.  I went back to my tried and true method six months later, but it was an expensive experiment – in terms of posterity.

by Chris Doelle