Lost

Blogs deactivated: 1 (bad); Blog posts vanished: 63 (v.v. bad)

Have mentioned that do some SL fashion blogging at iheartsl.com, which is a blog on Wordpress. This is/was a huge blog, with a lot of people directing in feeds from other fashion blogs. Some people, like me, just posted there directly. When I posted yesterday, there were over 16,000 postings. This is the post, on the right (just managed to catch it before it vanished off the fashionplanet.worldofsl.com aggregator). Now, you might think that the world is better off without such bizarre postings, and indeed if I don't fashion blog any more that will be, um, XXX hours per year saved to do more meaningful things. However, had thought that it was harmless fun.
Anyway, when logged in today, found that was unable to access iheartsl blog, or any of my blog posts on it. Instead was notice that blog had been deactivated for breaching Terms of Service.

To cut long story short (since should currently ber finishing off teaching for tomorrow, not maundering over lost fashion blog posts) the blog contravened TOS in that took paid advertising. Gogo (also my landlady in SL, for my shop on Juicy), who runs iheartsl, claims that they had been in communication with someone who was not her, which is why she didn't give anyone any notice, see http://juicybomb.typepad.com/blog/2009/10/why-i-moved-iheartsl.html

She has set up another site, but basically for people who feed in stuff from other blogs, and she doesn't say anything about people like me who are apparently waving bye-bye to their old posts.

Have sent report to Wordpress asking for access to posts back (as certainly don't want whole 16.000 iheartsl.com posts to sift through for my 60!) and will also notecard Gogo, but is is rather depressing.

Lessons learned:

- remember that when use free blogging services, can all vanish overnight

- beware services where you are not the admin

- back stuff up (sigh) (of course I hadn't)

If really want to, can probably retrieve entries searching on Google and then clicking on "Cached" for each (just checked, yes I can) and probably should do it soon before they aren't cached any more. However will take time, which at present, don't really have. O bother.

Worst thing is that was going to use some of these entries in Serious Presentation giving on 12th October as a contribution to a seminar in an ESRC Research Seminar series. Am going to use autoethnographic approach to chart my personal journey. So not just frivolous nonsense. Honestly.