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Though previously I wrote (a bit tongue and cheek) that I was writing reviews because I had nothing else to write, that’s not the complete truth.  Granted it is part of it, but here I am writing about writing reviews and not actually writing a review, I’m just writing (I wanted to see how many times I could use the word writing and make the sentence coherent).   The other side reason I have for writing reviews is there are some other communities I’ve wanted to contribute to that I haven’t.  Most of these are review sites.   The main two are All Consuming and Amazon.   Though there are some other sites I’ve wanted to contribute thought and effort into such as Netflix and Google Books.   

Reviews are a mainstay of communities, especially online ones.   The old psychological study on mirroring proves we relate better with people like ourselves.  When someone shares the same thoughts and ideas we have an attraction to them, a kinship.   Writing reviews and contributing to these other communities give me a bound and a vested interest in these communities.   I think moving into movie, book, and game reviews were a natural progression for me after signing up for Yelp.   I joined Yelp to check it out and I find it intriguing.  Review the restaurants you go to, sharing the experience with the world.   

In the new era of personal publishing and media, we’ve all become food reviewers, movie critics, book analysts, and game raters.   The power is to the people.  Our voices may not be strong, but they exist.   When we find people with similar tastes in the areas that we love, we trust their reviews.   I’m not saying I’m an expert, I would never pretend to know what you like or you enjoy in your heart.   I can show you what I enjoy and maybe we’ll have a mirroring relationship.   One that spurs on conversation and gives us a two way street in which we can share and trust reviews from one another.   Not everything will be a perfect match, but I’m sure it will lead to some interesting discoveries.

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I’m out of writing ideas.   Well that’s not completely true, I have lots of writing ideas.  My problem is that I just don’t know how to write them yet.   When I sit down and start to write them they are not coherent, too short, and don’t make sense.   More or less these ideas still need to fester away in my brain some more before I can spew them out in some sort of legible thought.   My dilemna is that I want to regulary update my blog, and I want to write.   Maintaining a writing regiment keeps the mind sharp, keeps your readership up, and gives you practice in writing – which does make you a better writer then actually thinking about it.

To this end I plan to start writing movie, book, and video game reviews.   Originally I was going to use spoilershorts.com for that – but the original concept had reviews in a very short form.  I may repurpose it and post the reviews from creeva.com over there also, but for now I look at the writing and not positioning.   I’ve always wanted to do reviews, but never really got around to it.   With the exception of movies that are new and in the theaters – I’m going to hold off on movies I see at random and focus (for now) on what I actually own.   Sometimes I’ll even be offering my own copies for sale (I really need to clean out and trim down some of my collections).

I’m not going to turn my blog into a review blog, I’m still going to write my random unfocused style – the reviews will just allow me to write ahead and make sure that you have something new and interesting to read every single day.   It will also allow me to copy and paste and get some of the reviews done that I’ve wanted to do for All Consuming and Amazon.

Write once – use everywhere – the crossposters motto.

Yesterday on my main blog I wrote a quip on my battle for the search term “creeva” in google and how many hits it brings back.  It flucuates up and down and was more of a joke then anything.   However I started thinking about it a little more deeply last night.

I’m a huge crossposter, I don’t deny it.  My friends can track me down and find me whereever.   I manage to get new readers by utilizing diffferent sources to store my data.   When I wrote a blog post on my main blog, it gets copied or notification goes to many other sites.   The path it takes is that I write an article when I click publish it sends out the article to my myspace, my live spaces account, my vox account, my tumblr account, my suprglu account, my facebook news, my old blogger page, my xanga account, my livejournal page, my multiply account, and a google group for back up (that one is private though).   On top of that livejournal also sends it on it’s way over to my dandelife account.  I’m also copying things over to www.creeva.net which is my by beta testing blog.

If I listen to a song that get’s scrobbled to my last.fm account, upload a picture to my flickr account, digg a story, favorite a video, share an RSS news item, write an article on a blog other then my main (like this article) or mark something down in all consuming; these all get pulled into my main blog, which at that point goes through the data dissemination process all over again.

This is data portability at it’s finast (at least for the content side of the equation) and I work it well.   Some people prefer to go to a single location and that’s fine, that is what I have a main blog for.   Get everything from everywhere all in one location.   Google loves the idea of everything in one place, it’s their whole mantra.   However you will get penalized in Google for having duplicate content.   So my google score will drop theoretically the more places I cross post to that it indexes.

So by disseminating my content to everywhere in the world Google will penalize me in it’s search ratings.   It seems my main blog still gets the most traffic and it’s hits don’t suffer.   So all and all I don’t truly mind.   However I’m sure that sometimes I do suffer when my vox account for example rises to the top instead of my main account.

How can Google truly and actively support data portability when it’s anti ethical to it’s search rankings?  I can understand that it’s an attempt to fight spammers and such, but we all end up hitting pure spam BS blogs all the time.  The crap floats and rises to the top while the rest of things drown in the data deluge.   I don’t think that google necessarily needs to adjust it’s algorithm but in the coming months or years it will need to take it into account.

Original From: Does Data Portability Hurt You in Google?

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