Because I spend too much of my time online – blogging, posting photos, emailing, facebooking, and other activities (read: looking at funny pictures of cats) – the web services I choose (or don’t choose) are increasingly starting to cause me trouble.

I’ve made some missteps in the past. I chose a random photo host years and years ago, because they offered easy uploads and produced a ready-made website to show my pics – all very handy and easy to use. But in the years since, they’ve added very few functions. Unlike Flickr, my DotPhoto doesn’t allow tagging or any sort of networking. I didn’t want those features at first, because they didn’t exist. But I want them now… and DotPhoto’s developers don’t seem to care (mind, I haven’t actually asked them to develop this for me, but I’m guessing the answer would be: “who are you?” and “get out of my house, I’m calling the police!”). But downloading and then reuploading all my pictures would take about a year and a half, and it seems insane to abandon half my photos on one site just to move to another.
I’ve got this problem with email, too. When I signed up for Hotmail many years ago, it really was the best free web-based email service out there. I swear. When Gmail launched way-back when, I got an account, but never really used it, because all my archives were on Hotmail. Now, the whole Live Mail crap is so slow and old-fashioned that I wish I was on Gmail, which is so much slicker and quicker. (I will probably move soon… keeping my Hotmail account to hold my archives, which as noted above, is annoying).
And blogging. Blogger was and is a solid service, but it hasn’t developed as well as the super-shiny WordPress, so if I want to upgrade, I’ve got to import my blogs, which is a painful process, it seems.
I think I got it right with Facebook – everyone I know seems to be on it, from my internet-loathing sister to friends who have sworn they’ve better things to do or already have a MySpace page.
And maybe that’s the key. I didn’t sign up for any of the first social networking sites (Bebo and MySpace and others I’ve forgotten). So maybe it’s better not to be an early-adopter and just hang-back and let the cream rise to the top.

But that’s no fun, is it? Unless someone develops (see above) a shiny way to move my stuff from one site to another, I’m not sure what to do… any suggestions/thoughts from my dedicated by usually comment-free readership?

Some people say they just can’t survive without their mobile phone – if you hear that from an Iraqi refugee, they mean it.

The UN has announced it’s sending text messages to tell Iraqi refugees in Damascus that food aid is available for them.

What an awesome use of technology. While it seems a bit incongruous that these people can get a phone and a signal, but not food, well, welcome to modern warfare, I guess.

According to UN High Commission for Refugees spokesperson Jennifer Pagonis: “We have found text messages to mobile phones are one of the most effective ways of communicating with the refugees who often do not have a stable address but either they or someone close to them in their immediate community has a mobile phone.”

Whoever came up with this is a genius. It’s such a simple way to use now-basic technology to solve a problem. And it is a pretty massive problem: Syria says 1.4 million Iraqis have escaped to that country since the 2003 US-led invasion – that’s a lot of people to communicate with. The UNHCR and local partner the Syrian Arab Red Crescent have already sent 10,000 text messages to families in the area. Rations are expected to go out to 50,000 refugees by the end of this year.

If you want to support the Red Cross/Red Crescent efforts in that area or elsewhere, details are available here.