Your thoughts, your pictures, your daily life … maybe it’s your journal, or your diary. Do you own it? Should you? Facebook backed down last month when people said its user agreement gave it ownership of users’ pictures.
Anita Campbell started me thinking about this yesterday, with her post on digital sharecroppers.
Is your life on Facebook? Twitter? Your blog? Or, perhaps, this question instead: who’s making the money?
Facebook makes money off the ads it puts on your page. Twitter intends to make money some day; in the meantime, it builds users.
When I post on this blog, at least, my writing is mine; and the ads you see here are for my own work. When I post on other blogs, like Up and Running, or Huffington Post, I get satisfaction, somebody else gets ad revenue. What about your blogging?
Me? I’m okay with it. Facebook and especially Twitter feel to me like I’m connecting with friends, I like it, I do it on purpose, and I’m not concerned with protecting rights or intellectual property. Actually I’m grateful for the platform. My blogging on the big sites gives me a voice, and that’s worth it to me.
How about you? Is it working for you? It’s a question worth asking.
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Comments
I, too, started thinking after reading Anita yesterday. Making the distinction between "business" and "social" is becoming a hard one to make. As long as we can use the social media to drive traffic, followers, friends, customers to our business sites it is a good deal. I agree with your philosophy here – we just need to make sure we are the ones deciding how we are using each sector.
Thanks for the always interesting and enlightening ideas!