Captain Video saves the Faculty Assn. blog videos and audios from cloud destruction

An earlier post noted that past audios/videos of Regents meetings, UCOF, PEB, and certain radio or TV interviews or debates were in danger of disappearing from this blog due to the discontinuation of video-Yahoo. I have now transitioned these files to Facebook and embedded them on the blog in place of the video-Yahoo versions. In particular, the early materials that were part of the discontinued savingUCLA website are available on this blog at:

http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2010/06/selected-non-youtube-audios-and-videos.html

It is useful to preserve these materials, particularly where policy commitments are made by Regents, administrators, or others, in the event that policy changes are subsequently made. In some cases, the audio quality of the files is poor, either because it was poor on the originals or because a limited-quality file was made for Facebook. If you need a better-quality file for some reason, email me and I will see if such a file is available.

The experience with video-Yahoo serves as a cautionary note about so-called “cloud” computing, in which files are stored out there in the ether somewhere and may disappear (as clouds do). In the video-Yahoo case, the disappearance is due to Yahoo’s commercial decline in the face of competition from Google, YouTube, etc. So if you have files you want to keep, back them up somewhere local even if you also put them in the clouds. --Dan Mitchell