If there's one thing that's characteristic of Web 2.0, it's that a lot of people made it very easy to create free accounts that let you do some very small, specialized amount of publishing on their site. From recipes to wish lists to book lists to diaries to reviews, almost anything you can possibly think of writing had a home "free" on the net, as long as you were willing to have someone else's advertising there sponsoring it.
With the retrenching in Web 2.0 properties - either sites getting bought up and closed down, abandoned by their new owners, orphaned, or mutated beyond recognition in the search for profit, it's time to start looking closely at what kinds of remnant "internet presence" I have lurking on the internets and see about turning off anything that's no longer relevant or up to date. Here's a list of sorts of long-forgotten enthusiasms that should be mercifully excised or republished in some current format.
Yikes! There's a lot of debris here.
OPML blog - Dave Winer's software for publishing; I used it about a dozen times between 2006 and 2008. The sidebar is full of links to blogs that I don't read, helping boost their pagerank. If I can get back to it, I'll nix it.
superpatron.com - Once upon a time I was going to move my Typepad blog for superpatron over to Wordpress; that project stopped before it really got started, leaving a half baked page up. Redo that so that it redirects properly.
Vacuum #8 - The last iteration of my Blogger based blog from 2003, after which I switched over to Typepad. It's a relic, and I think I'l keep it as a relic, in part because I used to have a functioning design that had a nice ever-growing ad hoc sidebar full of marginalia and none of the Typepad designs really support that well.
Edward Vielmetti - Socialtext Customer Exchange - yikes, a wiki. It should get a copy of the standard bio.
Flickr - Not many photos uploaded since my camera died a technicolor death. My bio is about two years out of date, and it doesn't have the current picture. I'm increasingly irritated by Flickr's cutesiepie error messages, which don't line up with their unpleasant treatment of key staff. When my Pro account runs out I probably won't renew it, which means I need to unpublish about 130 photos.
Jaiku - Like a bad penny, it follows you around, collecting scraps of things that you once fed it and keeping them for all eternity. There was once a time when I used Jaiku when Twitter was down, but it's been so thoroughly orphaned by Google that it's hardly worth the bother.
Plazes - Like a bad pfennig, it follows you around, collecting scraps of information about where you were and remembering them for all time. I used to use Plazes, but enough creepy encounters from people who were unsubtle about the uses of always-on geolocation soured me on the use of any remote location tracking software ever again.
Scribd - Hey, once upon a time I created an account! I hope they have password recovery.
Amazon - This bio is a few years old. Do I really want to share my wish list - which no one has ever bought me anything from - with the world? After all I don't really use it as a wish list, just a way to bookmark things within Amazon.
Wikipedia - Eeek! A wiki. Not very useful or helpful as a profile page, perhaps that's just as well.
ACM Portal - Only one publication; gotta get on that.
Pandora - I haven't used this in how many years?
Meetup - Party like it's 2002.
Xing - If I'm going to really use this, then it needs a complete overhaul - what's there is also woefully out of date. I'd be better off starting over.
a2skatepark - eek! Ning, I think, gets the credit or blame for this skeletal self-description.
Plaxo - eek! Needs work.
plodt - huh? I never remember signing up for this, but it seems to be stalking me.
VegGuide - I apparently used this once back in 2004, and it hasn't forgetten about me yet. Yet.
43 Things - For a brief shining moment in 2004 this was interesting; now it's just more crap on the net beyond my direct control. I hope they have password recovery.
Yahoo 360 - I had hoped that they had killed this off, but I guess they didn't; the sleeping baby on the front page is now almost 4 years old. (cute kid, huh?)
ListPhile - I hope they have password recovery; I don't remember ever signing up for it, but there I am larger than life. Huh?
Vox - I'm averaging about a post every six months.
There's more, I'm sure, and I'm not even counting all of the aggregators and refeeders and etc etc that replicated stuff I wrote without me asking to or having any control over the presentation.
