ahem…
When creating content, whether it’s a book or a blog, it’s almost always better to go at it alone. Relying on other people for vital aspects of your content… can create some serious vulnerabilities.
A good example is what photobucket just did.
Photobucket hosts images on its servers that can then be embedded other places. This saves people storage space, eliminates the need to upload to multiple places, and in general just made people’s lives easier.
Well, that was when photobucket was free.
Now it isn’t.
To be able to use photobucket and embed images on other websites you must purchase a $400 a year membership from them.
Countless blogs and forum posts are now plastered with Photobucket’s ransom demands.
Your content could’ve remained unchanged if you had not used Photobucket. You will always have to rely on others in one form or another… but you do not have to rely on them for everything.
It’s got to be better to get rid of the fickle, the flippant, the flaky companies and people in your content creation than allow companies to basically hold your work for ransom.
Now an interesting note… while Photobucket hosts a staggering number of images, in the billions apparently, you may very well never come across a broken Photobucket picture. Why? Because not only is the internet so insanely massive that we can’t comprehend the scale of it… people visit an astonishingly small number of websites regularly (on the order of ~ 100 websites per month, a handful are regulars like Facebook and YouTube).