Image from here

I’m the crossposting whore – I write once and I have everything designed to publish everywhere (well at least when things aren’t broken like Ping.fm to Myspace blogs).   This however is not syncing, it’s distribution and publishing.     A true sync across all platforms would be amazing.

The example I would love is I make an edit to a blog post, then every place and profile that I’ve published that post on would update with no manual intervention.   Since I can’t do that, Creeva.com is considered my authorative location for all blog posts.  If I wanted to edit those other sites I would have to do each one manually.  Granted I’m sure without using syncing it saves on bandwidth.

Things that I can sync?   Well my contacts and calendars with Plaxo, but that kind of is just the tip of the iceberg.   My biggest issue write now is syncing Flickr photos to Facebook.  I am aware of Flickurbook, but this still uses your local machine – there is no reason this can’t be done “in the cloud”.    It’s all soooo sloooooow.   Seriously at the speed it moves I could just reupload all the pictures to Facebook faster then this thing goes.  It’s free, it’s the developers fault, it’s great what he did; but it’s not the solution I’m looking for.

Finally using my distribution chain I chase all over the web to answer comments.  I don’t mind doing that.   However, wouldn’t it be better if across all platforms and services these comments were kept in sync?   Then I could use the spam filters I wanted to from a central location.  I could reply to comments from a central location.

I’m just pipedreaming again…..

I’m a publishing cross-posting whore.  I admit it.  I don’t deny it.  I want to get my stories and information out to the widest possible audience.   I signed up with Associated Content on July 9th.   I was going to make it part of my crossposting network disseminating my thoughts across the intra-webs.   I however never actually published anything with them.  Today I received this e-mail:

Hello,
My name is Brenna and I am a Community Manager at Associated Content. I see you haven’t published anything since signing up with us.
I wanted to let you know that there has never been a better time to publish on Associated Content. AC has grown by leaps and bounds in 2008, and we’ve paid out over $1 million to our contributors. We’re offering thousands of Upfront Payments weekly, we put out new Calls for Content every day and our record traffic (over 41 million page views in November!) means higher than ever Performance Payments. We hope that you’ll take advantage of this great time to publish with us.
For our American Content Producers, we’ll be giving away six iPod Nanos to Content Producers throughout December as a token of our appreciation. Publishing a piece of content for Upfront Payment automatically enters your name in the sweepstakes, and we’ll be drawing two new winners each week starting on December 16. If you’ve a lready published for Upfront Payment in December, you’re already entered. No purchase necessary. Full contest rules available here.
Happy Holidays and I hope to see you around the Associated Content site soon.

–Brenna

So why haven’t I? Well that answer is simple.  If I want to publish with Associated Content I had to give away the rights to my work and I couldn’t keep them Creative Commons licensed.   That means if I wrote something I published on Associated Content I can not legally re-use or republish it on my site.  I also can not publish it on my site first.

This is a major issue for me.  I retain control on who/what/when my content is used, at least to the extent that I don’t want others to put restrictions on my work.   99.9999% of the time use my stuff, I just want the credit for originally creating it, beyond that do with it what you will.   However if I entered into an agreement by submitting work to Associated Content I would no relinquish that control without gaining anything since being paid is not a guarantee.

For those who do publish through Associated Content, be aware of what you can do with your own data.  If you are fine with it, good for you.   I’m not trying to say my method is the only one, it’s just not a venue I want to deal with.

I had been thinking that ping.fm wasn’t crossposting because of something on their end.   I discovered they changed the plugin’s configuration options and I hadn’t updated them.  My bad.

I really didn’t have time to write about this last week when it first came to my attention but it seems that Creeva.com has been banned from Technorati for gaming the system.   It states that I republish materials from other sites onto this blog.   This is not untrue, though 90% of my posts actually originate from there.   If I write something I centralize it all on creeva.com.   It’s simple.  It’s efficient.  It allows me centralize and backup my writing.

That being said, they aren’t wrong.   One of the underlying experiments that this blog does is crossposting.  It crossposts to myspace, facebook, tumblr, blogger, and many more.   I don’t make huge piles of cash (haven’t made a dime in my pocket yet).  I don’t blast people with ads, though on some sites including the main there are some that are there.   I’m not doing it to drive up profit in any way.  I’m doing it so different communities can read my stuff.  I won’t harp on it, I’ve written about my crossposting before.

The question is how relevant is Technorati becoming.   I know this question has been asked before, and I used to believe in Technorati.   I didn’t start 500 blogspot accounts to promote the material.  I used 1 public site per service.  For the point of experimentation and proof of concept.  I also have been slowly working on a whole article series on how to crosspost.   With the myriad of services and the fact that data is not yet truly portable, but beginning to become so.   How can these services accurately  track where information is originating from.

Like I said I’m not annoyed, I can live without technorati.  When people are posting links to their site on tumblr, friendfeed, twitter, and others how long before there are more people like me?   Services like Ping.fm and HelloTxt serve in a market segment only to fuel this further.   I’m not someone who has a targetted truly branded blog beyond self branding.   I don’t have a certain topic set I cover and regulary write about.  I’m a schizophrenic writer that is all over the place.   The only thing I hope is consistent is my voice.  Beyond that take away from my writing what you will.

Picture from here.

Looking at my access logs on the site I noticed a referral from this page.  At the top of the page it stated this:

Blogged without permission to: http://creeva.com/2008/08/08/i-cant-link-to-your-web-site-man-your-retarded/.

Now my first instinct was “What the Hell”, I then checked and verified this came up under a creative commons search and made a screenshot.

Now under creative commons that applicable (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs) (I searched to see what was allowed to do to the image after this came up) it states:

Under the following conditions:

• Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

  Attribute this work:

  
  What does “Attribute this work” mean?

  The page you came from contained embedded licensing metadata, including how the creator wishes to be attributed for re-use. You can use the HTML here to cite the work. Doing so will also include metadata on your page so that others can find the original work as well.

• Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
• No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

I did copy (well I linked to the photo on Flickr) and I distributed the work because it was embedded in a blog post.

The conditions:

Attribution – I followed the norm for creative commons licensed Flickr images which is to link to enclosing page where the picture is from.   No other conditions were specified by the creator, so I took the industry norm for such usage.

Noncommercial - Though someday I would like to get paid, my blog is a non-commercial work and I would testify under oath and in court that my blog has never netted a single penny into my bank account, into my pocket, and in any tangible meaningful way.

No derivative work – when speaking of the image I did not alter, transform, or build upon the image in any way.

Using this image like I did I was well within my legal rights.  I left this comment on the page:

You know you stated that this was blogged without permission to my site on the page http://creeva.com/2008/08/08/i-cant-link-to-your-web-site-man-your-retarded/

The problem with this is that you released your photo under creative commons.  For all my posts I only seach for flickr photos licensed via creative commons, just so I can use images legally.

I clearly underneath the photo linked back to this page which is attribution – I didn’t obfuscate, nor did I claim it was my original image.  If anything it was to help drive traffic back to your site since I didn’t want attribution given to me any way shape or form.

Now I don’t mind the fact that you state it’s blogged without permission, but this comes down to the fact that you licensed your photo under creative commons originally, and you don’t seem to understand the rights you’ve given up by this.  I’m not using this commercially, so I am within my right.

Please see this flickr search:

http://flickr.com/search/?q=Kitty+Reindeer&l=cc&ss=0&ct=0&w=all

and you can verify that this image is listed under creative commons use – or see this screenshot http://flickr.com/photos/creeva/2909390861/

Under more in depth searches – you are not allowing commercial use of this photograph, which I am not doing.   You are also not allowing anyone to modify, adapt, or build upon – which I also am not doing.

Also though Flickr allows you to remove a creative commons license legally once something is released under creative commons it’s eternally released and irrevocable.

While my first instinct was to remove this image I’m letting it stand because of the license you chose regardless of your understanding of the license.

If the creator had contacted me in any way shape or form this may have been a different issue and I may changed the image (at least on this site I don’t know if I could catch everywhere I crosspost to).   Now however since I am a firm and hard believed in public domain and creative commons rights for creators, it’s become a matter of principle.  If someone doesn’t understand what creative commons is, they shouldn’t use it otherwise they will loose rights that they thought they had.  I did not publish this in a book and made no commerical profits off htis image.  I followed the license as it was written and intended.   If the creator didn’t understand those rights, well that’s another issue.

Picture from here

It seems some fo the RSS aggregations sites I use (Profilactic, Iminta, Friendfeed, etc.) generated too much data and I had to remove them from my lifestream page displaying their latest updates.  The problem wasn’t the amount of data on my lifetream page per say, but in the fact that I generate a daily update of online activities (which sometimes the sites I crosspost to get double posts of).  When I had these uber data generating feeds it created posts that were too large for wordpress to handle.   So between a choice of haivng these in my lifestream or saving a daily record – I choose the daily record.

The other day I received this e-mail in my inbox:

Hi Creeva,

I would love a review of my site if you feel it would be worthwhile…

Twiggit is an automated service that lets your friends on twitter know what articles you digg. every so often we check for the last article that you voted for on digg, and update your twitter status to reflect this.  Options include the ability to only tweet the articles you submit rather than digg, pause the service at anytime, change the frequency of when to check digg, completly remove your twiggit account.

There is nothing like this in the market, we aim to bring digg and twitter closer together!

http://twiggit.org/

Any questions please let me know :-)

Jason

It took me a few days to add this onto my plate, but I did get around to signing up for the website.    At one time I attempted to crosspost all of my online activities over to twitter – this got way to spammy.  When I set it up this account I configured itto send everything I submit on Digg to crosspost over to Twitter.  Since I sometimes will go on a digg spree and digg 50 stories in a day I didn’t want all of them to show up as tweets.   Props to them for thinking about this.

To test this out I submitted a recent story I wrote onto Digg attempting to find out a title about a movie I was tracking down.   The product works as designed.  All in all there is no frills, it’s single purpose – but single purpose that works quite well.  There are other methods of doing this such as importing feeds into twitter – but while Twiggit is essentially doing this at the back end – it makes it easier for people that would be intimidated by the level of understanding that this takes.  Twiggit is something I would send over so my parents could set up (if any of them used Digg or Twitter), versus something psuedo complex that I would have ot configure for them.

On the downsides, there website shows the following image:

If you look at the bottom of the image it says it received it 2 minutes ago from Twiggit.  This acknowledgment seems to be missing from my tweet which states submitted 1 hour ago from web.  I’m assuming this is a bug.

All in all Twiggit is not something groundbreaking, but it’s deserves it’s niche.  In the era we are moving into of micro-niches it fits in quite nicely.   With all the sites that integrate with Twitter, Twitter needs to start setting up a developer API similar to Google or Flickr so we don’t actually have to give these sites our Twitter usernames and passwords.  That however is a rant for another day.

UPDATE:

Originally the title mentioned Twiggit.com – which is the parent website of twiggit.org – the application is at twiggit.org.  Unfortunately I can’t catch everywhere I crossposted this story to, but I’m editing here on the source site.

Here is what has been published this week.

Articles:

Traffic Does Not Equal Money

My Copy of Little Brother Arrived Yesterday

Rant On The Myspace E-mail System

Out of Date and Unpatched Computers

Sharing Information – Who To Share It With

Being Excited About a New Browser

What Do The Brain Dead Write When They Have Nothing Else – Reviews

Mashable Doesn’t Really Like Ping.fm

The Crossposting God Series Part 8 – Using A Lifestream to Keep Track of Your Crossposts

Movies I Own – American Psycho

Why Did I Start Writing Reviews

Thou Shalt Not Covet – Really?

Rebloggers – Why Are There So Many of Them?

Movies I Own – Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure

Movies I Own – Harsh Times

Daily Activity Summaries:

Online Activity for 2008-08-29

Online Activity for 2008-08-30

Picture from here

In part 8 I was going to write about crossposting to blogger, but that’s been delayed for the time being.  I’ll get back to that subject as soon as I get a chance.   Let’s move onto monitoring your crossposting.

Some people may have noticed that on my lifestream there seem to be duplicate posts.   This is because I’ve been working on adding all the RSS feeds from all the services in one trackable lifestream.   The benefits are that you can see and track how long information takes to get from one site to the next.   This also allows you to see where your crossposting is failing.   For example I’m noticing that my posts going to pownce are not getting through so when I get a chance I’ll look into what is actually causing that.

Lifestreaming all of our sites into one endpoint site that you can control and maintain allows all the little maintance to happy at a single glance.   We all know that crossposting is usually best effort delivery.  Not everything shows up in all the sites, but that happens because your not actively maintaining those sites and sometimes things just go wrong.

By having a single stream of all of your sites you are not bogged looking at RSS items for every site all together.  If I put all my feed items in google reader then it would take me an hour each day to get through all of them.  Having a quick glance allows the information to be singled out in a daily quick view.

Currently I’m using the wordpress lifestream plugin to handle my lifestream page.  It gives me the benefit of having a daily summary post generated automatically.  This allows me to have a permanent archive of all of my daily archives that I can go back search and vault away in my own life vaulting fashion.

Life is good.  Maintaining and monitoring in a single glance – that’s great.

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

The Crossposting God Series Part 4 – Entry, Distribution, and End Points

The Crossposting God Series Part 5 – Myspace

The Crossposting God Series Part 6 – RSS Feeds to Crosspost

The Crossposting God Series Part 7 – Where Can You Post By E-Mail?

There was an article on mashable today questioning if ping.fm and hellotxt were helping the web world or hurting it.  I understand the authors point that if you are using these services that you are not taking an interest and active use in the social community that you are using these services to post to.   I can say from hits for ping.fm beta code requests on my blog, that lots of people are interested in getting access to ping.fm.   Now that it’s out of private beta I’m sure I’ll lose my number one spot in google for the term “ping.fm beta code”.  

If people want this what does this say?  It really means that we have diverse friendships.  We have communities that we want to share information with.   We don’t have time to manually copy or paste, nor do we have the time to try convince everyone we know to use a single service.   Since we can’t bring our friends to the service (much to the dismay of the social network providers), we take our information to them. 

We want to share our information, we don’t want to hoard.  I for example do all my writing on my main blog, twitter, and handful of other services.   Yet I have friends on almost every little social network out there.   Why should I be forced to chose between friends and the information I share with them.   Yes I’m sure some actual readers that are not into crossposting get annoyed over the repeated information on multiple services.   What about my friends though?   Where does the line of a healthy blogging business end and friendship cross?  My friends are the ones that inspire, the will always have the information directed towards them.    I am more then willing to take my information to them.   At what cost, a minor annoyance to literally a handful?

No one is forced to read my messages.   No one is forced to follow me.   No one is forced to my site.  If the author doesn’t follow ping.fm links, so be it.   I’m not losing what I truly care about.   Maybe when the a single network has all the features I want and 99.9% market dominance – then I’ll stop cross posting.   Until that time I’m proud to be a crossposter.

Picture from here

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.

Picture from here

One of the most interesting things I’ve learned over watching web statistics of my visitors is how many unpatched computers there are out there.    I see a ton of firefox 1.x browsers, Internet Explorer 4, 5, and.   Windows 98, Windows 95, and even Windows ME.   Now some of those I can understand, but Windows Millenium?   Seriously?   I ran windows ME for a whole 48 hours before converting back to WIndows 98SE.

I can only imagine how many of those are completely spyware infested.   Part of the reason I do my best to keep my blog patched, occasionally a virus comes along that will infect web pages.  I will always do my best to keep that from happening by visiting any of my sites.  Graned some of the sites I crosspost to I can’t control the patching on, I can only hope their administrators are on the ball with all those obsolete and vulnerable OS’s around.

Picture from here

Fifty thousand to eighty thousand, that’s how many people will have read my main blog by the end of the year.   To me that seems huge.  Some guy (almost said kid) from a small midwestern town having that many readers.     That’s also just my main blog and not counting everywhere I actually crosspost to.

It just blows my mind, now I understand that in the blogging world I’m still extremely small potatoes.   If I wanted a larger audience I would target my posts more accurately.   I would be more active and work on bringing up my social network connections.   But I don’t.

I like my growth organic.   So far this looks like it’s going to be a good year.

Picture from here

Some people may notice that on my lifestream page it has a new look and feel, it also has a whole lot more stuff in it.   I’ve transitioned to a new lifestreaming plugin, previously I was using the “Simple Life” plugin.   The new plugin is is called “Lifestream“.  It allows me to put in more RSS feeds then I was previously able to with “Simple Life”, it also performs a daily digest post (which has allowed me to stop using the twitter plugin I used to use to pull in my digest of tweets).   There is one bug with the digest posting in the fact that it does a double post.

For creeva.com this is easy to fix.  I just go in each morning and remove the duplicate post.   However the people feeling the sting are the ones that I crosspost to.   There is absolutely no way I’m going to go everywhere my data replicates and track down and clean out the duplicate posts.  I have been in contact with the plugin author and he is aware of the issue.   He did some massive updating last night, let’s hope this got corrected.  I was also kind enough to hide these daily posts from the front page of the blog.   I didn’t want to make it seem that all I did was do daily updates of myself.  I’m not that vane to broadcast on the front page of my blog.   There is a link at the bottom of my lifestream to direct you to my lifestream archive.

The other thing to notice is the multitude of items.   It makes me look like an internet posting maniac.  Ok I am an Internet posting maniac, but not as much as my lifestream shows.  I thought it apt to try to get information on where my stuff is being posted and pull in the RSS feeds from here.  This will allow readers to see everywhere I crosspost to how frequently they are updated.

We’ll see if this is the magic bullet for my life vaulting.

I’m a huge pain in the ass  that’s how one person put it.  I’m currently on the hunt for people that went to VHS high school and that were in marching band between the 1991 graduating class and the 1997 graduating class.   When I find you I will question you and bother you, and try to convince you show up.  If you are from classes other then these and I know you, I will still bother you and get you to show up.   I’m sick of seeing only 3-4 faces that I went to school with.

The list of my class is short for the ones that seem to have an online presence.  There are a few I just refuse to talk to, but I have no problem sending intermediaries in place ot these people.   I want to see more people from my era.   I know probably none of them read my blog, but since this get’s crossposted to myspace, facebook, and ungodly number of other sites I’m hoping it will at least make an impact somewhere.   If Mr. Price does not have your information on file please contact him.   Information on the rehearsals, practice, and uniform (as well as contact information to get a hold of Mr. Price) can be found at www.vhsalumniband.org.

Hopefully I’ll see you all on the field.

Here is the way we were:

Here is the way we are:

Bring back the memories.