I got an email earlier today essentially expressing concern about the long term viability of nomadlife.org as a blogging community.
Here's the answer:
nomadlife is designed with longetivity of content and scalability in mind (a.k.a last virtually forever), after 3 years experience in seeing how the community developed in aiesec.ws.
1.
Content Preservation. We rely on blogger.com as the main blogging, so your weblog post exists in two place, one with google (which owns blogger.com) and another in nomadlife.org. This redundancy is important so if nomadlife goes kaput tomorrow, you will lose none of your content and you can simply revert back to using blogspot or other public server. If google goes kaput, we are all fucked; but I would think they will give some ways of their 8 millions blogger user a way to get their data.
2.
Picture Preservation. We rely on flickr.com (owned by Yahoo) to host and manage your picture. If Yahoo goes kaput, we'll be in trouble; but the solution is similar to no 1.
3.
Dumb Cheap. Dumb system doesn't take too much processing power, which means we don't need a powerful computer to be able to host a lot of nomads. The funky future nomadlife systems are designed for minimal impact on computer resources as well.
SilverKey right now is spending only about 100 bucks a month in hosting and this cost will not increase until we reach 5000 nomads. After that the cost will double every 5000 nomads. If SilverKey goes kaput, we can do
"girls of nomadlife calendar" to cover the cost (sorry, guys of nomadlife calendar won't sell) .
And the cost of bandwith and hosting is going down every year. 4.
Collective Responsibility. nomadlife domain name is owned by Devrim, the nomadlife main blog is a no-question-asked shared weblog, your weblog is your own;
5.
Lazy and Neutral. No one is relying on nomadlife as a source of income or living, making it one of the laziest and looses online community management on the web; there is no official brand to protect; no ego to save; no hierarchy to kiss up to. This is how an online community looks like when its managed by lazy fat asses slackers.
6. Diffused Identity. nomadlife has a cool, edgy and clean conotation attached to the name that you can use for a long time; and the nature of our gathering allow you to define what the name means to yourself; there is no organizational agenda behind this, just a free flow congregation of cool, passionate, interesting people.
Google and Yahoo are the gold standard on the Internet right now so we are on a very solid ground; Devrim will most likely not become a pornographer anytime soon so nomadlife.org domain will stay; the cost of operation is bloody cheap and an untrained monkey can administer it;
All these factors makes nomadlife one of the safest way to blog. This is a company to keep.
