A couple of things conspired to make me think it was time to make sure that I’m capturing and keeping my own data.  I’ve been keeping a self hosted WordPress site for many years, but frankly, rarely update it.  I tend to think of it as appropriate for long form writing with no actual audience. 

If I want people to read something, I tend to post in Facebook or Twitter,  sometimes Google Plus.

I was  looking at some cutting edge cellular network planning tools that incorporate twitter location data as a reference to compare against cellular network data.

It made me realize that there is problem an awful lot of data that I could use to document where I was, what I was doing, etc.  A passive diary so to speak. I’ve been aware that other’s were tracking what I was doing, but had this epiphany that it might be nice if I actually used that data. 

The other news item that caught my eye was to see that Google is abandoning much of it’s archival activities.  It just doesn’t seem relevant to their core mission anymore.  Which added some urgency to me to make sure that I download dumps of my data from Facebook, Google, 4square while I can.

My intention is to import that into some type of blogging platform such as this one, so at least I have access to it. 

I’m most familiar with WordPress, but have lately been looking at some others based on Python (my current programming kick).   Hopefully I’ll share my findings.

Here are the links to instructions for downloading your information from major social media.

1. Facebook.

2. Twitter

3. Google

I would love to hear if anyone has any tools for re-importing this data into some type of CMS.