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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.

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

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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.

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I randomly go through my commentors and visit their sites and profiles.   This is more out of curiousity then anything else.  I’m curious who they are what they are interested and what they write about.   In most case they are not much different then myself.   They are geeks, or lovers of crossposting, the occasion security geek.

While for this post I don’t really have a point, just an observation.  “They” say to make your blog sticky and interesting you build up a community.  You interact with your commentators and make sure you comment on their posts.   I’m just curious how many of the bloggers actually read what their commentators have written that fall outside the realm of their own door step.

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Always being on the bleeding edge, I upgraded to WordPress 2.6 today.  I upgraded all the blogs hosted on my account to the latest and greatest wordpress installation.   Since according to article that announced the release, the inner workings and plugin system remained the same as 2.5.  I’m hoping this means none of my plugins break.

I don’t think I will be that lucky though.  I do know upgrading my N810 to Diablo caused breakage in the applications I used.   As long as all of my crossposting still works I will be a happy upgrade monkey.   We’ll see how it goes.

Original From: Parent Phobia Blog To-Dos

Remember to the old days?  When you could launch a blog and just start writing?  When you just hoped and prayed someone would come and read your stuff (ok I still do that).  These days however it takes a bit more self promotion.  I already managed to snag a domain name otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this.   However there are a few more things I need to secure until the blog is fully up an operational (then I can go take that Princess Leia – how does your precious Alderaan look now? – (too much?)).

I need to:

1.  Set up a proper e-mail address

2.  Setup a Twitter account

3. Setup the blogfeed to post to the twitter account

4. Setup a baby status twitter account so the short and sweet updates can be in one place for family and friends and not buried in my mindless tweets.

Then we can start the shameless self promotion of ourselves – is that shameful self promotion – ask my friends I say it’s former they tell me it’s the latter.

If you are reading this on Creeva.com then be warned you are only getting half of the story.  I will be crossposting all of my own writing over to Creeva.com, but I won’t be taking any of the other blog authors stuff over.  This means you are doing yourself a disservice by not going to Parent Phobia directly.

I would recommend subscribing to the Parent Phobia feed at first, then visiting the site regularly through the week.   Once the Twitter account is up I would recommend adding that as a twitter contact.

As things get in place I will be posting regular updates and I highly recommend you get back to the main site and read Xie‘s stuff she is going to post on Parent Phobia since I’ve read some of what she is working on and it’s truly great and personal writing.

If any readers have a suggestion of something else we can add please let us know – and no we are are not creating a myspace account for you to friend.

Original From: Parent Phobia Blog To-Dos

I have 10 Iminta invites, my crossposting has made it so I’ve jumped through hoops across multiple networks giving out my last bunch.  So here is what you have to do – you have to go to creeva.com and post a comment on this thread there.  The URL is http://creeva.com/2008/06/11/10-iminta-invites-available/

Make sure you include your real e-mail address in the proper field (which is hidden and I won’t share) so I have an address I can send the invite to.  The first 10 people get invites.   You don’t have to leave your e-mail address in the comment body.

I have 1000 Onaswarm invites, my crossposting has made it so I’ve jumped through hoops across multiple networks giving out my last bunch.  So here is what you have to do – you have to go to creeva.com and post a comment on this thread there.  The URL is http://creeva.com/2008/06/11/1000-onaswarm-invites/

Make sure you include your real e-mail address in the proper field (which is hidden and I won’t share) so I have an address I can send the invite to.  The first 1000 people get invites.   You don’t have to leave your e-mail address in the comment body.

Granted I used my default invite text above – but seriously since it says I have 1000 invites – if your dog wants one just send me another email address.

I have 19 jaiku invites, my crossposting has made it so I’ve jumped through hoops across multiple networks giving out my last bunch.  So here is what you have to do – you have to go to creeva.com and post a comment on this thread there.  The URL is http://creeva.com/2008/06/11/19-jaiku-invites-available/

Make sure you include your real e-mail address in the proper field (which is hidden and I won’t share) so I have an address I can send the invite to.  The first 19 people get invites.   You don’t have to leave your e-mail address in the comment body.

I have 10 Evernote invites, my crossposting has made it so I’ve jumped through hoops across multiple networks giving out my last bunch.  So here is what you have to do – you have to go to creeva.com and post a comment on this thread there.  The URL is http://creeva.com/2008/06/10/10-evernote-invites-available/

Make sure you include your real e-mail address in the proper field (which is hidden and I won’t share) so I have an address I can send the invite to.  The first 10 people get invites.   You don’t have to leave your e-mail address in the comment body.

Here is a video overview of Evernote:

I have 50 twine invites, my crossposting has made it so I’ve jumped through hoops across multiple networks giving out my last bunch.  So here is what you have to do – you have to go to creeva.com and post a comment on this thread there.  The URL is http://creeva.com/2008/06/10/50-twine-invites-available/

Make sure you include your real e-mail address in the proper field (which is hidden and I won’t share) so I have an address I can send the invite to.  The first 50 people get invites.   You don’t have to leave your e-mail address in the comment body.

To learn more about Twine take the overview tour.

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Where can you post by E-mail?  Well this is the easiest of crossposting methods (especially if you use Blogger).  There are lots of plugins for wordpress or movable type that can send out your full post as an e-mail to another address.   In most cases you would send this to your own e-mail address so you had it for reference.  What about sending it to another site entirely?  What if that site could send it to another site?  You can see how this chain can work.   If you are using Blogger then you can send out your post to ten e-mail addresses.   This means that your post can replicate like bunnies.   What are some of the sites that can receive e-mail posts?  Let’s get into that.

The original Creeva’s World was hosted on Blogger at creeva.blogspot.com.  This is where I started writing and I didn’t want to abandon it after migrating over to wordpress.  This was the very first site I crossposted to from my wordpress blog.  Crossposting allowed me to not abandon my site and any readers that may go to that address, but I could enhance my own experience while keeping theirs the same.

Lifelogger is the “cooler” blogging service, at least that’s what they say.   I’m not going to use any blogging platform again that I can’t customize to the fullest extent.  WordPress has spoiled me.   Though I do maintain a site there.

Unlike some major social networks (I’m looking at you Facebook and Myspace), Friendster does support e-mailing in your blog messages.

Blogr is just another blogging host that accepts e-mail.  Very blogger like, but crossposting friendly.

Evernote is unique unlock some of the rest of these sites, Evernote is a notebook service.   It allows you to e-mail in snippets (or use the desktop applications) to send in information that you can then share with your friends.  You can e-mail in text notes, audio, or video.

Busy Thumbs is a simple moblog site that accepts posts via e-mail.

Twine is similar to Evernote, but it’s about collections and community.   Think of it as sharing what you have with your friends.

Google Groups is a spot that I used to use as an online backup for my blog.   I have a private google group that only handles my own blog posts.   No you can’t join, not like you would want to.

I’ve just recently start crossposting to an old Yahoo Group that I used to moderate.   Mostly this is because I can share my thoughts with my friends that are still in that group, but that group is essentially dead.   So this is the only thing that it’s around for to keep me from pulling the complete axe on it.

Each Day is designed to handle your memories and save them so you can go back over your life.  It handles multiple media formats but all I’m concerned about is the e-mail option.

Multiply is a social network in the same vein as Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook.

Over at Vox I maintain a page to integrate with their community.  I’ve posted in the past how vox is a unique community and because of that I receive unique feedback.   They refer to their e-mail inbound service as moblogging.

I like to think of all of my blog posts as separate documents.   After working on this for awhile, I decided to start e-mailing all of my entries to my google docs account let’s me to search and repurpose documents a little easier then searching through the blog.   It’s my dump all account for documents.  I am annoyed that I can’t e-mail blog posts to Zoho Writer for redundancy, they only take documents as attachments.

When you are looking for a new site to crosspost to check and see if they have an option where you can post by e-mail.  Some sites may refer to this as moblogging.  Also remember to e-mail your post to yourself so you have a backup you can control.

Oh, I use the DJ E-Mail Publish plugin to push out posts from WordPress.

In the next part of our crossposting god series we are going to cover Blogger more in depth.

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

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RSS, I love RSS.   RSS makes crossposting easy.   It also allows me to read all of my news in Google Reader instead of jumping to 50 different sites that I used to visit once a day.  RSS allows users to subscribe to your site and read them where they want to, this may be good or bad based on your advertising style.  If you are like me and don’t really make a dime on your blog, then it doesn’t really matter.

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I use feedburner as a choke point for every web service that has an RSS feed (and I’m a member).   This allows me a couple things, the first is I can easily remember all the web services I sign up for.  The second thing is I have feeds that I can automatically plugin to lifestreaming services that don’t support the sites I use natively.

Through RSS I cross post my blog to Tumblr, Profilactic, Friendfeed, Suprglu, and any other life service I come across (just search for Creeva as the username).   Now At this point I’ve made feedburner to do all the heavy lifting and bandwidth intensive work for feed readers.  I even use my feed (a filtered version) to post notifications to Twitter when I have a new story published using the Twitterfeed service.

The other key thing to remember with RSS is when we get to the widget space.   Some sites don’t have an option for crossposting, they are completely locked.   You can however (in some cases) place a widget in your profile on these sites.  More times then not you can manage to place an RSS widget.  An RSS widget shows your current RSS feed items and allows you to place them on these profiles that otherwise have locked data.

With wordpress there is a plugin called feedwordpress that aggregates feeds and publishes them as items on your blog.   They keep trying to make this plugin better, but I can tell you it doesn’t seem ready for prime time yet.  I’ve tried every trick imaginable and I always end up receiving duplicate entries in my main blog.   Because of that I don’t use feedwordpress anymore, I may try in the future.  This would lead to the ultimate life caching solution, by allowing my blog to pull in all the data I generate everywhere else, and then crosspost it to all my friends across the web.  Unfortunately it’s a pipedream at this moment.

Now click the logo to subscribe to Creeva’s World 2.0:

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In the next part of our crossposting god series we are going to cover services that allow you to publish by e-mail.

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

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Mobile computing is becoming my newest fascination.  My previous fascinations included network based storage, network redundancy, and network security.   I enjoy making things do things that they were meant or designed to.   This is part of the sould that drives my curiousity to the edge of insanity and teeters over the maw of the great beyond.   I think eventually I will completely loose it and tumble into that gaping mouth that will swallow my soul and my body whole.

Mobile computing isn’t what it was even 3 years ago, mobile computing by traditional defintion means being able to computer while having the ability to travel.   Mobile computing devices were originally laptops, then PDA’s were taking over, now cell phones and custom Internet devices like my N810.   The question you need to ask is this still what mobile computing is, or is it being morphed into the new Internet buzz phrase “Cloud Computing”?

While I’ve been doing my crossposting series I’ve been thinking about what it truly means to be mobile and to work in the Internet cloud.   Ironically there is more to my online activities then my blog and how far reaching I can make the posts go.   I have pieces of me that exists in the cloud.  Part of this is my blog postings, sometimes this gives you an intimate side of me.   There is more that make up who I am and my goal is to see how I can migrate that online so I can access it any time and anywhere I have a net connection and an interface to the online world.

I have the basic or myself, my memories in the blog posts.  As I go on and digg further in my past more of these will survive through that.   What about everythign I create?  What about my pictures, my videos, my friends, my documents; will these things always be able to exist in the cloud?  While there are methods to storing these data types online, what about when a service goes belly up?  If a company goes out of business and you are relying on them with your data, where do you turn?  Even the great and powerful Google isn’t immune to canceling a service and dropping your data.   How do you stop that?  How do you save your data?  Is there even a reason for home storage anymore?

I can say just typing that out that there will always be a reason for home storage.   There will be private documents that you never want to show online.  Private thoughts that will always remain yours alone.   Until extrememely heavy encryption is ubuiquitous and tied soley to you, there is no reason to trust this data online.  If you don’t want ANYONE ELSE to ever see it, keep it away from the Internet.

I’m going to start a new blog series that investigates working in the cloud.  I know that this has been done before, but I think it will work nicely with my crossposting god series.  Why?  Because I’m going to focus on data redundancy and survivability in the modern Internet age.   I’m going to touch upon security and point out the insecurity that exists that most of us seem to ignore.

There are pieces of me scattered in teh clouds, I want some semblance and organization before I run into the hurricane.