Akkam’s Razor

I use Bloglines for feed reading, del.icio.us for bookmarks, gmail for email, newsvine for news reading, digg for technology news, and flickr for pictures.  Is the data that I store or collect on these services mine?  What protections does it have?  And am I free to do whatever I want with it?

As Google and Microsoft get ready to unleash product wars that will make Import versus Domestic, Coke versus Pepsi, or Republican versus Democrat look like friendly handshakes, the "Big Brother"-NSA-MySpace drama, and the safety and security concerns of using online applications on servers that I'll never see leaves me a little unnerved.

I think what I would prefer, since I have unfettered access to broadband, both at home and work, would be to have a server running at my home, where I could run a mediaserver like Orb, Wordpress, and whatever else I would like on a dedicated machine.  I was thinking that an embedded set of applications like a version of Office powered by TinyMCE or FCKeditor, a photogallery suite like Menalto's Gallery, a virtual hard drive for file storage, and maybe a Wiki that I could get to would be perfect.

I'm also thinking that a Wordpress plugin that went out and backed up my various data sources all in one place, where I could manipulate them to my lil' heart's content, maybe allowing me to make a personal Zeitgiest page…