Posted on April 28, 2008
Are Personal Sites a Thing of the Past?
BY
Yesterday I came across an entry on Jeffrey Zeldman's blog talking about a seeming disappearance of personal sites. In one example, he talked about a site that, while it contains links to what might in the past have been links to other internal pages, all of these links took the user to external sites such as linkedin, flickr, twitter, etc.
While there can be advantages to outsourcing your online persona in this manner, there can be possible disadvantages as well. As someone creating an online presence, you should be sure that you understand what you want to use your personal site for (if indeed you even choose to have one amid the sea of social networking sites). Social sites often let you create a profile where you provide links to personal sites--these can help drive traffic to your personal page. Likewise, providing links to these social sites on your personal page can drive traffic to these external representations of you.
Ultimately, these two types of sites--personal and social--can balance each other out and drive more traffic and attention to you than you might otherwise have experienced if you were to forgo one of the options. However, the more you outsource, the more potential for less traffic to your personal site, and if this is where you house the most important content, you might see smaller readership.
You might also want to consider the implications of giving up direct control of the hosting of your content and what it means if these external sites were to change their policies or suffer a major outage. The more sites you sign up for, the more you have to keep up with in terms of updating, which might be cumbersome depending on how many social sites you use.
A reader in the comments of this blog entry did make a good point though in stating that giving out a personal URL somehow doesn't have the same weight that it used to. In a time where virtually everyone has their own Myspace or Facebook account, people want like to respond with like. For the average person, these social sites are sufficient--there is no need to bother with HTML and creating a custom site. It's also that much more effort to remember a personal URL than it is to know that you can look someone up later on Facebook and friend them.
Is there a need for an average person to have a personal site anymore, or is it completely redundant when the info can be found on multiple social networking sites? Should one keep all content in-house, or outsource it to other sites such as Flickr, Del.icio.us, Myspace, Youtube, etc.? I for one have not formulated a definite answer to these questions, but I would love to hear any opinions on the matter!
Share this blog post
