Creeva’s World 2.0

Photo From Here

When we think about cross­post­ing, it actu­ally is more in depth then most peo­ple think.  From a very sim­ple level you go from one site to another.   At a higher level though you are pub­lish­ing from a sin­gle source to tens if not hun­dreds of places.   Used cor­rectly cross­post­ing is a very pub­lish­ing tool that lets you gain read­ers very cheaply (or free), as long as you are will­ing to login to all of these other sites to main­tain read­ers and com­mu­ni­ties.   If you are not will­ing to login to all these remote ser­vices and address com­ments, sug­ges­tions, and crit­i­cisms; then cross­post­ing is not for you.

There are three dif­fer­ent func­tions in a cross­post­ing archi­tec­ture.   These func­tions include your entry points, dis­tri­b­u­tion points, and end points.   You could also add fil­ter­ing points but uti­liz­ing ser­vices like yahoo pipes, but for the moment that is out of scope of this dis­cus­sion (for the moment).   Each of these steps is impor­tant and you need to make sure you don’t get them screwed up or you can be in for one heck of a data cleanup time.

Data entry points are areas in which you inter­act, cre­ate, and start your data.   In my exam­ple if I wanted to put up an audio or video post to my blog I would use Utterz.   With Utterz I can be on the road and pick up my phone, record a post, and it auto­mat­i­cally gets posted and dis­sem­i­nated through­out my net­work.  If I have a pic­ture I want to share I nor­mally upload it to Flickr and the chain starts all over again at that scale.   Via  SMS I can insert a quick sta­tus update to twit­ter and alert every­one fol­low­ing me and change my sta­tus across many net­work (I also do this via IM).   For longer writ­ten posts I nor­mally start at my own main blog.   It just feels write to actu­ally write this and start with my blog (though other blogs I may write an arti­cle on will even­tu­ally make it back here).

Dis­tri­b­u­tion points (which in some cases dou­ble as end-points in my design) are sites or ser­vices that pull in data (or has data pushed into it) and at that point sends the data off to another ser­vice.   In my archi­tec­ture sites that can resend data out via e-mail (such as blog­ger) become major dis­tri­b­u­tion points for me.   You have the abil­ity to resend out up to 10 e-mails to other ser­vices from blog­ger.  Another major dis­tri­b­u­tion ser­vice for me is feed­burner, this allows me to shape and fil­ter me RSS feed and push this data out to other ser­vices either via wid­gets or into ser­vices that can import in RSS feed data directly.

End points are the sites or feeds in which your read­ers are actu­ally inter­act­ing with you at.  It’s where they are read­ing and pro­cess­ing your infor­ma­tion.  It’s where com­ments are given and it’s where your data actu­ally has mean­ing has come to rest.  Some end-points may seem use­less in your over­all archi­tec­ture (and yes when you become a cross­post­ing god it is archi­tec­ture), but how much is the one or two read­ers worth that may dis­cover you through that ser­vice?  Nor­mally it takes only a cou­ple min­utes to setup a pro­file on a new ser­vice and set your data in place once it starts from it’s entry point.  If you can’t auto­mate this you need to decide if it’s worth the time to copy and paste the data across.  To me, if I have paste data into an end-point man­u­ally, then it’s not worth it to me.   Every­thing has to be done automatically.

In the begin­ning of this arti­cle I men­tioned that you need to make sure you don’t con­fuse a role in your archi­tec­ture.   The rea­son you need to be aware is that you have a chance of regur­gi­tat­ing the same data over and over again across all of your end points.  When this hap­pens the clean up is hor­ren­dous and can take any­where from hours to weeks.   The amount of effort you put in is rel­a­tive to how much you care about that extra data hang­ing out on your end points.   The more pop­u­lar and feed­back you get from an end point the more care, feed­ing, and pre­sen­ta­tion care you should put into it.

In the cross­post­ing god series part 5 we’ll be cov­er­ing myspace.

Pre­vi­ous Entries in The Cross­post­ing God Series:

The Cross­post­ing God Series Part 1 — The Introduction

The Cross­post­ing God Series Part 2 — Vox

The Cross­post­ing God Series Part 3 — Live Jour­nal and Deriv­a­tive Sites