This is a short but important one. Earlier this week, Google lost ownership of the blogspot.in domain. On the day this post was written, it is still marked ‘for sale’.
If you created your blog in India, Google automatically redirected the <your user name>.blogspot.com domain to <your user name>.blogspot.in. Over time, the latter became the domain most sites would link to. This means with this change, all the links that referenced your blog via blogspot.in – Twitter, Facebook, other blogs, even Google search results – are now broken.
In the new Fire 2.0 era your presence online is your capital, meaning the ownership of your identity must reside with you. Not with Linkedin or Twitter or Facebook or about.me. Nor with Google or WordPress or Substack, all of whose business priorities and decisions are independent of yours. These can all be destinations where you publish, build your tribe, create your reputation, but your canonical identity should be your own domain.
This instance seems to have been a mistake but it could well be simply Google deprecating country-specific domain names – a business decision. Like its decision to shutter Google+. Or Yahoo’s to shut down Geocities. If your blog was on one of those, it’s gone from the Internet. Or it could have been on Livejournal, sold by the American company SixApart to a Russian media entity, now conforms to Russian law and serves Russian ads. In all of these cases, you do not have control over your presence.
If, like Google, if ever you forget to renew your domain, let it be your oversight.