There’s so much talk these days about blogging being dead. Many people are turning to microblogging or using free services like Posterous or Tumblr instead of hosting a blog of their own. Quite a few people who are still keen to blog turn to free blogging services like Blogger or WordPress.

These are all great services! They all rock for different reasons, but what happens to your content if they close their doors? You get what you pay for.

Here’s how to Backup your tweets

I use Tumblr and Tweetake to backup my tweets. This way I have an archive of the content I created over the years. It is our content that we must protect. Twitter owns your tweets, you don’t. Facebook owns your status updates, you don’t.

When you write a blog post on your blog you control your content. You can send your friends, fans and followers to your blog post via Twitter, Facebook or however else you choose, but the point is that you control your content.

I use WordPress, but I pay for my own hosting. I backup my content regularly, so I am confident that should something go wrong, I’ll be able to restore things.

Ask yourself this: Am I in control of my content, or is someone else?

How comfortable are you with your answer?

Photo from Flickr by: tarop

Also of interest, you should really check out Ping.FM to instantly post to Twitter, Pownce, Plurk, Facebook, Jaiku, your blog, etc. You’ll need the code: landofping.

Have a great weekend.

While I’m still a huge fan of Twitter, the days ahead will continue to be rocky if Twitter continues to go down. I’ve even started using my Pownce account again – just in case.

Plurk explain their service as…

an easy way to chronicle and share the things you do, the way you feel, and all the other things in between that make up your life, with the people close to you. It’s instant gratification, instant self-indulgence, instant celebrity, instantly YOU. Share your life stream, live your life….Plurk!

Have you tried Plurk yet? What do you think? Hit or miss?