Once upon a time I wrote on this blog once per week. In January of this year, though, I decided to write five days a week. My readership has been pretty steady. Excluding people who read via RSS feed, I used to average about 30 hits on the blog per week. Now I am averaging about 300 per week.

What is interesting to me, though, is how easy it would be to turn that into 3000 hits per week. In short, it would take about two extra posts per day. And that includes zero marketing of my web site and assumes I attract no new readers.

Why do I bring this up? Because the allure of web hits is a strong one and a self-reinforcing event. This is why most blogs post so much garbage: the more posts, the more page views; the more page views, the more revenue per ad.

The problem, though, is that I don’t want to see all this garbage. What I really want is someone to decide what the most important headlines of the day are and present them to me. Nothing more, nothing less. And this is hard to find.

I have tried a number of apps and websites and been unsatisfied with the results. Even sites that advertise the top news of the day show it to me in time order. Guess what, folks? The most important news might have been at 8am this morning. It should still be the top headline.

I recognize how hard this is to solve. First, how much is too much and how much is too little? Is the New York Times too much while the BBC app is too little? Second it is impossible to get discovered. There must be three billion “news” apps all trying to do the same thing. Third is that elusive thing called ad revenue, which drives the bulk of the revenues in that business.

My desire to be informed conflicts all too often with the time I have to do it. In the evenings I like to sit with my iPad and catch up on the happenings outside of my little mobile and tech world. After three years, though, I’m still searching for the right app to do it.

In my personal life I keep a blog about my daughters. My wife, due to divorce and hard times, never got a baby book and we wanted to do something better for our daughters. We share picture and video-taking duties, and I write most of the stories. On that blog I have 550 posts over 6+ years, averaging out to about 6-8 posts per month.

The problem, though, is that I am writing this blog to last longer than one lifetime and there is little guarantee of the technology being around that long. I can’t even keep the technology around for 5 years!

I started the blog on Google’s Blogger platform. What a mistake! The environment was exceptional at the time but like so many things Google, Blogger had fallen into disrepair. Uploading media through Blogger meant videos went to Google Video and pictures to Picassa. The first problem I ran into was that the iPad and iPhone came out and the only videos I could embed were Flash-based. So I decided to move them.

It was at this time that I realized that Google would let you put your videos into Google Video but not get them out. This pissed me off so I switched to using WordPress instead with YouTube for new videos. Since I was hosting my site at WordPress.com and didn’t want to pay them for more space for my photos, I started uploading the photos to MobileMe, which I was paying for, and linking them into the blog. I’m paying! The service won’t go away!

Oops! Apple cancelled MobileMe and gave me a year to move them.

This started an avalanche of concern for me. Given the amount of time and energy we had put into creating this blog we wanted to make sure it was around for a long time. I needed services that were more stable. So we licensed our own shared server, bought our own domain and moved our WordPress installation to it, thinking we’d be safer.

But now we have photos and videos at multiple locations. Some photos are at Picassa and some are uploaded to our server through WordPress (including a painstaking process of re-importing all of the images that used to be at MobileMe). Some videos were at Google Video (which I couldn’t get out) and some at YouTube. Then Google announced Google Video would be shut down in 45 days so I scrambled to find all the videos in our primary collection and upload them to somewhere and re-link them into the blog posts. Videos, in particular, are a problem because I need someone to serve them and make them playable on the web. I tried uploading them to an Amazon S3 installation and then linking to them in the blog but all I get is a link, not a player. So I bit the bullet and uploaded them to YouTube, which seems to be the best solution for now. I still need to consolidate the photos.

Now… I’m not happy with any of this. It just doesn’t feel stable and secure, like I have control over this. I don’t like pictures being in the WordPress repository, uploading is arduous and WordPress seems to make multiple copies, fattening the hard drive. Videos are often too big to upload to my server so have to go somewhere else. And the big thing I have received from this is a deep mistrust for Google. I don’t believe any of their services will be around in 10 years, let alone when my girls are 75 and want to show their grandkids.

My wife can trace her family back to England and France, on the Mayflower and across the pond. They have a rich history, including one of the early California pioneers. There are pictures and letters passed down from generation to generation of just the immediate family. But now that we are so technologically focused, it seems less and less likely that the files and formats we rely on today will even be around for the next generation to see.

All of this work could be for naught.