I’m annoyed.  I am really and truly annoyed.  I don’t know what to write about (and I have only a vague notion of what I’m writing about in this post as I go word to word).  I have five to six unique sites that I have to write on and go forward with, however I’m not aving much success.   I’ve moved back to taking some of my writing out of the context of anything goes, which is still the point of creeva.com and everything else off site it crossposts/filters down to.   Some topics however it’s hard to write on topic and come with the subject matter.

Journeytogetpaid.com – this was supposed to document how I make money online, well I haven’t really been successful at the monetization side yet – so I don’t have much to write up.

Parentphobia.com – ok I have one story in the works, and I have to get a scan in so Xie can publish something – so part of that is just laziness – but there isn’t a bunch of news on the pregnancy.  Maybe I’ll get on some of that tonight, since there is a doctor’s appointment on Wednesday.

Spoilershorts.com – this was supposed to be a group review site, I think this site will be going away though when the subscription runs up, I have better venues for this type of information.  We shall see though.

Unnamed Retro Project – I bought a retro domain and was going to write about my retro passion and different items – I’m a few articles in, but I want sixty days worth of material before I launch, that is taking a buttload of effort that I haven’t had the time to put in yet.

Unnamed Life Vaulting Project – Some people want to know more about my life caching, or life vaulting as I’m referring to it now.   I have a domain registered, I want 30-45 articles first before I open this up to the public.

I’ve already started future writing articles for Creeva.com so for another couple weeks you can be graced with a guaranteed one article per day, it just seems if I’m not on top of it writing gets pushed to the side.  It’s not that I don’t want write, I truly do.  It’s not that I don’t enjoy or fun writing – I do for that also.   It’s the coming up with the ideas and being able to generate enough content to make some of these other sites worthwhile.

I do have help on a couple of these sites  – Parent Phobia is also written by Xie and the retro project I’m supposed to be getting help on – I’m hoping for a late september launch on both of my unreleased projects.  I’m backlogged on howto articles, but on the plus side in alot of my future writing I’ve done more personal growing up stories.

I’m sorry you’ve had to read this big post about nothing that essentially has gone nowhere, it really hasn’t help me deal with my frustration, but it has allowed ot get something out.  Something new and something written.

Thank you for patience and continual readership.

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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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The other day I wrote an article in which I briefly discussed cloud computing and how I accomplish it in my life. I wanted to start a new series called “Living in the Clouds” which goes over the functions that you can do to migrate over to a cloud computing setup yourself.

First we need to define what is cloud computing?  Cloud computing is placing and manipulating on the Internet.  While part of this is cloud storage, where you store your data online so you can access it anywhere, the other part is being able to use and manipulate your data anywhere.   Whether this is from your home computer, your work computer, or any other device you have access to an internet connection with a browser, this is computing in the clouds.

I wanted to outline what I’m trying to accomplish with this series.   What I want to do is go beyond the normal here is a cloud service, isn’t it shiny?  You can get that form anywhere.   What I want to work through in each section of this series is as follows:

Data Types: What type of data can you store or manipulate and what are the best services for that.

Data Security: How can you trust your data and the providers you are using.  How can you minimize the effect of data leakage.

Data Redundancy:  This includes redundant services with the same data, how to make your data portable, and how to back this data up.

Data Accessibility:  What devices and items other then web browsers can you manipulate your data with, what API’s are available.

I’m taking all of this from a perspective of what do I use and how do I use it.   I want to let you know what works for me instead of dovetailing in a goo goo gah gah review over something new and exciting.   If I don’t use it to a decent extent I will let you know.   I will include speculation and theory sometimes, but when I do I will alert you to such.

Hopefully this is a series you will enjoy.

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Myspace.

Myspace.

OK, I’ve repeated it a couple times I think I’m ready to actually talk about it.  Unlike some other services where I explain the community and the functions, I’m going to refrain from doing that for Myspace.  While I do have a myspace account, I won’t say that I truly like Myspace.   I haven’t even bothered to give myself the uber l33t cool profile page.   It’s a thing, not a good thing, not really a cool thing, just a thing.

So if I’m so “meh” towards Myspace why do I post there?  Because unfortunately some of my friends haven’t seen the light and still utilize the server.   I keep in touch with old gaming friends there especially, so I feel I want to broadcast my information there as much as I do anywhere else.   I’ll tell you what though, it isn’t easy.   Myspace may proclaim new found openness, yet getting information into Myspace without using their tools is a pain in the butt.

There are three things you can do remotely to update Myspace and keep your friends up to date on you.

• RSS Widget
• Status Updates
• Blog Posts

RSS Widgets:

For any site that allows you to place a widget into your profile, and does not allow you any remote options to any other functions, RSS widgets allow you to bypass the whole “you can’t put our data in our service unless you use our tools” wall.   While Myspace is getting better, it still wants you to play with it’s tools.

If you do a search for RSS widget “Service Name” in Google you shuold be able to pick and choose the one that is right for you.   By editing your Myspace profile and putting your embed code into your profile, you should be able to display the news feed you want right there on your profile page.

While this is all fine and dandy it doesn’t really cover what a crossposting god wants to accomplish, so let’s move onto some of the other options.

Status Updates:

Your status updates, the “I’m in my room crying cause Kurt Cobain is still dead” status updates that you use on Myspace if your an aging emo kid, these can be done remotely.   By utilizing service such as Ping.fm and Hellotxt you can update this via instant messenger or my choice, my Twitter account, without ever logging in.

You can do this by creating an account on Hellotxt or Ping.fm and they will give you an email address in which you can notify them of your current status.   We’ve discussed on ways to utilize e-mail notifications for use with other services, now you know the gateway to updating your Myspace status message.

Blog Posts:

Blog posts are the final achievement of the crossposting god when it comes to Myspace, unfortunately I only have a solution for WordPress users.  There is a plugin called MySpace Crossposter that will send your post over to your Myspace blog when it receives a publish event notification.  To get some of the information in configuring this plugin (it’s one of the most pain in the butt) you will have to open up your wp-config.php file to get the accurate information.

The options to program this plugin are as follows:

Database Settings:

These options will be automatically configured in future versions of the plugin. Most of the data is available in your wp-config.php file if you need to reference it.

• DATABASE HOSTNAME: URL of your database host. NOTE: there is no “http://” before this server name
• DATABASE NAME: Name of your WordPress database
• “POST” TABLE NAME: Only change if your wp_posts table has a different name… Most users need not change this variable.
• “META” TABLE NAME: Only change if your wp_postmeta table has a different name… Most users need not change this variable.
• DB USERNAME: Username for the database
• DB PASSWORD:Password for the database

Blog Information:

These options will be automatically configured in future versions of the plugin.

• BLOG URL:URL for your blog, complete with http://
• BLOG NAME: Name of your blog, as you’d like it to appear on your MySpace post.  Please note that it seems to have a problem with non alphanumeric characters, using them can cause some strange results.  I had to configure it to be “Creevas World” instead of “Creeva’s World 2.0″, your mileage may vary.

Myspace Login Credentials:

Without these, you won’t be able to crosspost.

• MYSPACE USERNAME:Your MySpace username – usually your email address.
• MYSPACE PASSWORD:Your MySpace password.

Post style:

Choose “notification” or “full story”.

• POST STYLE: n = Notification Style *recommended* (will drive traffic to your external blog) w = Whole Blog Entry (formatting may be lost in translation)

Because of longer posts like this one won’t show up in the myspace blog I just have it setup to post a notification of a new blog post, this also allows me to see how often I get hits from my Myspace blog (not often I’ve either unloved or uninteresting).

If you have further questions on making this all work together, please drop a comment below.  The next chapter in the crossposting god series is going to be on RSS feeds and making them work for you in broadcasting your information across the blogosphere in a controlled manner.

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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

To get an n810 or not is the question.   A few days ago I wrote a couple blog posts from my wife’s new n810.   I have some reservations about the keyboard for “power writing”, but that can be handled by a seperate bluetooth keyboard.   I think that’s not an issue.

Would I use it instead of a laptop – kind of.    Right now through work I have a Mac Book Air for my mobile device.   It’s great, it’s light, it does most of what i need it to do (what it can’t do would require linux or windows so it’s forgiven).    The one thing I run into with the air is the same thing I run into with my normal laptop, accessibility.   For normal computer use they are highly accessible, but if I do make it to HOPE this year or other travel venues it would be MUCH better to not bring a full laptop (if I do take an 810 to HOPE I’ll be accessing the internet through an encrypted Hamachi VPN tunnel to home and using a proxy there to access the Internet – no clear text information is going to be slipping by me – I can deal with the speed hit that will cause).

It’s much easier to have a bluetooth keyboard and an N810 to haul around to these places more so then a full laptop.   WIth a full laptop I need to worry about power (n810 has better battery life), privacy due to larger screen size,  finding a place to sit versus standing and using the n810.    These things are all things that go through my head while debating this purchase.

So yes the N810 would make me more mobile, and be more convenient.   I know for me (extreme power user) it won’t replace a computer or laptop, but for some people (like my sister) I could see this as a 100% computer replacement.   Too much geekery for me it seems.   So then we open up the question, could I live for a week with just the N810?

The N810 isn’t really designed for offline use.    If it has an internet connection that’s great.  I would be able to do most my blogposting and status updates via email so when I hit wifi I could sync up and go.   In alot ways I think this is enough.   To check this I need to menally compare it to my my Palm TX.

I’m not sure that the N810 will fully replace my Palm TX (then again no one said I couldn’t keep it).  WIth my palm TX I use it as an email platform, a web access device, a centralized syncing device, and an ebook reader.   Anything else I use it for is mostly games so that’s not really an issue – IM has always been painful on it do to .

Since the N810 does not have heavy document handling and I don’t think the resolution is quite right for ebook reading (the two thing I think I would keep my TX for)  it does have better web page filtering (my blog almost breaks the TX).   I would also be able to do IM since I wouldn’t be forced to stay on the IM screen like I do on the TX.   Email should be equal or better on the N810 versus the TX, Web Browsing would be better, and IM would be better.   The occasional full need to document editing and e-book reading would mean the TX could sit on the bottom of my bag (and a bluetooth keyboard would work with it – two devices one keyboard).

So theoretically I could replace my laptop about 90-95% with the two devices.   With having a much smaller footproint and ease of use in carrying these devices with me.   Having the N810 would mean that I no longer have to carry an iPod around since it would handle my podcast playing – bonus to the fact that it will auto scrobble to last.fm something that I have never gone working to a level I liked with an iPod and linux.

Movies however I’ll probably still use my palm TX – I can play full divx movies on it without having to re-encode them.   Bonus to me.    This will also have the side effect of saving me battery life on the N810 if the TX is with me.   I don’t watch movies too often on the go though.

Through hackery I would be able to sync my calender on google with my N810 – something that never worked right on the TX.   I would be able to compose music on the N810 (yes it can compose music).   Someone is also working on an instrument tuner – which is something I was going to buy this summer – so I’ll save 30.00 there.     I was going to buy an iPod, but with the 10 GB I can max out on the N810 and the fact that I only really use an ipod for podcasts would mostly make that that a non issue  – so a savings of 150.00 – so far I’ve saved myself 180.00 on stuff I would probably buy this summer.

There is an NES emulator (that works better on then on the TX) and a GBA emulator – this should save me from carrying around my GBA (which I ironically use more then my DS).   I also play RPG’s so the slight frame drop won’t really effect me.    I can use skype which really isn’t to much of an issue for me since I mostly would call my wife and we have free phone calles between us.   With utterz I can use my phone to “call in” blog posts.

I would be able to start geo caching with the N810 built in GPS, I’ve watned a gps for a long time, not for driving directions since I can look at a map easily and I’m able to figure out where I am.   My wife is sometimes jealous of my innate directional sense.   Usually I get way to lost sometimes by actually reading a map, wrongly at that.   I could get a cheap GPS for 90.00 – but that would take my total electronic purchases to 270.00.   We are approaching the N810 price.   (We actually match it if you figure out it would handle my gaming needs – but I already own those devices)

I like the N810′s keyboard versus the N800′s touch screen which my wife tried out first, but it still a small small keyboard and I have bigger fingers then her.   I can enter information quickly enough for a mobile device I can whip out real quick – and 500% faster then I can do on my phones keypad.     If I utilize bookmarks and saved password this should help limit my typing.   The less need I have on this the better.    Once again if I’m going to write a long blog post like this one is becoming i would have to have a bluetooth keyboard.

My tmobile internet connection is very slow on my cellphone, but being able to stop by any mcdonalds or burger king for quick internet access kind of alleviates that concern.   Granted wifi coverage isn’t ubiquitous but it’s common enough that I think I would be fine.

I’m probably going to decide tonight to get one.   Working through this post has helped alot.   I think I started with the fact that this would replace my palm TX, and going through that thought process I don’t think it would.   I think it will however handle the fact if I’m gone for a week or two away from a computer (though I can fathom two weeks away from a regular computer) that I could be just fine in a solely mobile solution without a laptop.    Using the host mode hack on the N810 coupled with the card reader program on the Palm TX means I’ll be able to utilize the Palm TX as a removable storage space on the N810 if I need it with normal SD cards instead of needing a thumb drive that would drain the N810′s power quicker.    This would allow me to throw another 8 GB and make the card switch out very easy for me.

I’ll keep everyone updated on what I decide.

One thing I’ve been working on for awhile is and Internet Deadman’s Switch.  With all of my crossposting and media re-usage activities in the grand scheme this should be fairly trivial.   I am sure however that some things will slip me up.   We’ll start in this section of identifying the goals I wish to acomplish and work through some of the stages in part two.

What do I mean by Deadman’s Switch?

A deadman’s switch is something that is triggered normally to keep you alive.   A quick example is the pressure plate on a riding lawn mower.   The pressure plate must have weight on it or the lawn more will not start and if the weight is removed the lawn mower will shut off.  So essentially one action cause another action to occur when certain variables are met.   My trigger would be my death.  If I didn’t verify if I was alive after a certain period of time to a program/website/etc.  the a serious of scripts and actions would trigger leaving behind all the information I wish to impart on those behind me.

Why do I want a Deadman’s Switch?

This idea started in my head about 7-8 years.   There used to be a website that had you check in once a month and if you didn’t log in it will send off emails to the ones you care about (or the ones you don’t).   This gives you the final word and allows you to send of those things that might be important.   I can leave my wife information about all my accounts and password, any relevant information that she may need and won’t be able to gather up, parting words to friends and families.   I would also thanks to my current setup be able to post to all my social networks and make an announcement of my death.   This I find intriguing and I’ll at least go through all the steps of implementing this (whether I actually use it and maintain it will remain to be seen).

What would I send?

I’ve broken down what I would want to send into four sections:

• My wife – I can deliver my final message, copies of important documents, access to all of my accounts and any other relevant information she needs
• My family – I would send each family member a personal message from the beyond – I also would send them a follow up to do with my wife in case something happened to her at the same time, that way there would still be someone i could trust that would have access to the information they may need to clean up my estate.
• Friends – I would send each of my “high level” friends an individual message – if somehow my whole family is taken out in one full attack – I don’t think I’m passing any of my personal information off to them.
• Public Internet at Large – this is broken into a few more sections, but essentially I’ll be leaving a video, audio postings, status updates to my social networks (“I’m dead thanks for all the fish”)), and a few final blog postings.

The trick to all of this is of course is reliant on a few things.   The first and foremost being that I can send email after I’m dead.   It also can not be reliant on my home PC (if a housefire hits or a tornado takes me out I don’t want my home to be the weakest link).   Finally whatever script I use must be able to pull from an FTP site (for the audio and video).    Once those can be accompished I’m fairly sure I can get everything else done.

When would I send it?

This is the other conundrum isn’t it?  How do you net tell everyone you have passed on while you are still alive (that could be embarrassing).    You need to pick a time period that seems suitable to you (every 12 hours is not suitable).  I’m thinking either every two weeks or every month I would have to login and verify that yes I am still alive and kicking.  The only problem this would really cause is if I’m kidnapped or held hostage.   The chances of those being so minimal that it is unlikely so I won’t really take those into account.   So to be safe I’ll set it for somewhere between 14 and 31 days.

Another thing I would like to do is configure it to be staggered.  That way I’ll be able to send a message to my wife warning her about the upcoming announcement of what is going to occur before it actually does.  Then to family, then to friends, and finally to the Internet as a whole.   This would keep it from being one big whirlwind hitting everyone at once like a ton of bricks.   I don’t want someone completely freaked out when they see a new youtube movie of my me uploaded.    So a staggered release would be the best scenario (if it’s possible).

How am I going to do this?

You’ll just have to wait for part 2.

Socialthing is a cross between a lifestreaming service and Spokeo.   The closest site I can directly compare it to is friendfeed.   If you are interested in an invite, the first two comments on this post located on creeva.com will get an invite.

Ping.fm allows me to sync my status from the following services:

• Bebo
• Blogger
• Facebook
• Hi5
• Jaiku
• Linkedin
• Myspace
• Pownce
• Tumblr
• Twitter

Keeping all the statuses in sync across all my services is a life saver.   If you would like to sign up use the beta code “pingfriends” and get in on the beta action.

Tevy’s my setup is kind of unique but I’ll give you the run down.

I post to my blog at creeva.com – when I make a post my blog crossposts to myspace, vox, livejournal, dandelife, blogger, msn spaces, xanga, and multiply.

My website also has an outbound feed – this is filtered to certain topics and posts notifications to twitter, tumblr, jaiku, facebook, and suprglu.

At then end of the day all the web services that I use (flickr, allconsuming, 43things, 43 places, cocomment, digg, del.icio.us, google reader shared items, youtube favorites, youtube uploads, picasa, photobucket, stumbleupon, newsvine, pownce, and any other blogs I use) are each wrapped up with whatever I’ve done on any of those respectice services through out the day and done as a single post (per service) on my blog.

Of course once a post is made on my blog it gets cross posted to myspace etc, with the exception of twitter (since I use it for notifications AND personal use) nothing really hits my blog twice since I’ve been very careful of any redundant data processing.

We’ll just say I love wordpress plugins

A few article I’ve written on this:

http://creeva.com/2008/01/11/life-caching-is-better-then-life-streams/
http://creeva.com/2008/01/23/brand-management-branding-yourself/

I’m sure what I’ve written above is missing some services and such but that’s about 90% of what is going on.

Now I know that this leads to alot of updates on myspace, but I’m sure this seems unnatural to some since most the people I know post next to nothing.  99% of the updates I see are XXXX updated profile information.  I look at the profile and it looks the same to me.   Very few people actually constantly upload pictures (I’m looking at an automated way to do this from my flickr account) or write blog posts.   So sometimes I need to go to other services to find the people like me that update their profile information and create content.

I truly want to read content from people I know, look at their pictures, or watch their videos it’s just that there seems to be so little, while I of course go through my cross posting glut.   My friends don’t like switching services and that’s fine, I’ll just bring all my glut of information and data to them.

Lately I’ve been playing with utterz, it’s kind of hard to explain but think of it as the gateway to blog from your cell phone.  It’s a short term blip based podcast – call in and leave a message and it can post the audio to your blog.   Send Utterz a picture, it will send it to your blog or service.   Send it a video and utterz will post it on your blog and youtube.

The coolest thing about Utterz is they keep adding connections, thereby making you more likely to use their service as your gateway for interacting with the online world.   It also seems to have a vox-like community that really intereacts with each other instead of some other web services.   The great thing that prompted this post however was not about the great community, it’s about crossposting.

Here are the innate services that Utterz will crosspost to:

Blogger

Livejournal

Tumblr

Pownce

Flickr

Yahoo Groups

Typepad

Twitter

WordPress

Movable Type

Twitxer

Drupal

Live Spaces

YouTube

Blip.tv

and MetaWeblog API compatible sites

(if I missed one I’m sorry Utterz)

Going to one places allows you to hit up everyone else,  I would almost wish to use Utterz as a distribution point instead of a web service, but I already have most of those covered (hey wordpress plugin writers, compose a pownce crosspost plugin).   I’m not sure how often I’ll use it, but it’s a nice option to literally just call in a blog post.   So with this I’ll use it for what it is.  I’ll let my wordpress handle most of the data dissemination across the blogosphere.

But this brings up the question, what am I crossposting to from Utterz?

Well the obvious is that is posts from Utterz to my main blog, the other settings I configured more mood.   All videos I post will go to my blip.tv profile and youtube accounts.  Pictures will go to my twitxer account and flickr accounts to be publically displayed.  Any additional messages will also cross post over to my pownce account (this will go away once I have a way to post to pownce from wordpress).

The only thing I’m unsure of  at this point is archiving my utterz – utterz uses a flash player to play the locally stored audio file.   WIth video files I do have a recourse of pulling them off of another service or using the source file for life caching purposes.   This is really the only bummer about the whole thing.

The awesome thing is when I call up utterz to post an audio clip now, my voice is now spread across about 15 sites at once.   That is true internet broadcasting of yourself.

If you head over to Utterz make sure you add me as a friend, here is a link to my profile.

We all go through it, a new web service launches and we think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.   We add a few friends convinving them to leave their current platform and migrate over to your new find.   Time goes by and a few months later you are realizing that your not really using that web service.   You don’t want to abandon your friends, you also don’t want to login to give them updates.  This is the dilema that many users online are facing daily.   Unfortuantely I can’t give you a complete answer, but I can explain to you what I do.

One thing I utilize in my social networks is crossposting.   Utilizing wordpress plugins and general trickery I manage to crosspost to my most used social networks where I may or may not have any friends, but I’m there so my friends can choose which social network they wish to follow me on instead of what I am using.   Unfortunately what I’ve learned is that I’m happy to update myself on social networks, but most people I know update slowly and don’t produce much content for me to read, so I more or less catch up on all of them via Spokeo.   Cross posting allows me though to update them without me having to manually go update myself on those other networks.   For all intents and purposes from my point of view if I don’t login and interact with that service anymore it’s abandoned.   The services I do cross post to are vox, myspace, xanga, live spaces, live journal (which crosspost to dandelife for me), blogger, and multiply.

This however only allows a fraction of the services I used in the past that share my content and link back to my main blog.   For other services I utilize RSS feed widgets or even automatic updates that occur via the RSS feed.   The services I use to crosspost my RSS feed items are tumblr, twitter, jaiku, facebook, suprglu, friendfeed, and lijit.   This allows all my updates to occur over to those sites.

I only interact with a handful of services, luckily services I do like flickr, youtube, facebook, and livejournal all import their comments back to my blog.   All web services I use that allow for an RSS feed I import via email subscriptions through feedburner.   This allows me to life cache.

If you have a service that you don’t use any more discover someway to import your updated content into it.   A little bit of effort that is automatic in the future goes a long way to maintaining those friendships you have on your social networks.   It also stops your friends from getting upset with you for abandoning them (they’ll never know the difference).

Google is all about consolidation of data, there whole mantra is behind it.  They have released oodles and oodles of services that I utilize (yes I’m a google whore – there I said it), but only minimal correlation between the tools other then a common login.   Many of their tools generate reports or data that could be transformed into reports.  Some of their services it’s almost brain dead that they haven’t integrated the services.   Let’s go through the services and how I would design “Google Reports”.

The most obvious Google “products” I would lump together would be Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Adsense, and Google Adwords.  All four of these products are usually used together – so why can’t we get reporting for all three on one page?  All of these products can give a webmaster an overview on where his site(s) are going and what he can work on.   There is absolutely no reason to go through four different interfaces to get this information.   Yes I can set up email reports from some of them – but a singlular report and page to view them at a quick glance would be great.   If I click on something to drill down on it could then take me to to the specific related products page.  While we are the subject of Google Analytics – a listing of recent page views ala the way statcounter does it would be great.   To be honest that’s the only reason I still use my statcounter account.

Those were the four products that prompted me thinking about this in total from the beginning.   Now let’s move on to the other products, video for example.   Google Video and Youtube both fit different niches in the google video structure.   Youtube allows you to upload video more quickly but has time and size limits, Google Video however allows downloads and unlimited sized and no time limits when you use their external (non browser based) uploader.  Now Google Video’s reporting very frequently fails to work – loosing view and download counts so this needs to be addressed.   But a report that would include subscribers, views, and downloads would be fantastic.

Feedburner should be tied into analytics also for the amount of information it gives you and stats, while I’m on a mini rant here when are we going to be able to inject adsense into our feedburner items?

Now let’s break into the quickies:

Google Base – ok I still don’t understand this product so I have no idea.

Blogger and Page Creator would tie in easily with Analytics – so there is no reason not to make this automated.

Browser Sync – The number of synchronizations and all machine that you ahve synchronized against.

Calender – Ok trickier but the number of appointments from a given day/month/week

Docs – Number of edits, number of documents, space they take up, and how many of your colloboration documents have had edits.

Gmail – Number of emails received, sent, spam caught, most frequent contacts, amount of free disk space.

Groups – could tie into Analytics if your the group owner but beyond that – number of members and messages – how many new messages if your just a reader.

Igoogle – um no clues

Reader – number of stories read

Picasaweb – how many times each photo was viewed, who has linked to it, and any subscribers

Finally webhistory – the amount of searches performed, and a concise list of sites embedded in the reports.

I would want to see report being able to be generated automatically on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis.   The ability to customize reports by date or time period would also be great.   The ability to atomically email them to you at a preset time would be fantastic.

The last feature I would add is an open API so we could plugin new reports and send them to google to collect and have other programs able to fetch and manipulate the data on a client side.  I know I’m asking pie in the sky at this point.

Google literally has all this data on us and more.  They are preaching data portability and openness so why don’t they consolidate and show us more of the data they are holding.  I’m not asking for all of the secret sauce just what’s relevant to me.  Combing the original few things before I went into quickie mode though would be utterly fantastic and an excellent starting place.

Original From Journey To Get Paid: Google’s Next Service Should Be – Google Reporting.

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Posted By Creeva Murkado to Journey To Get Paid at 4/11/2008 12:19:00 PM

I’m sure the big name blogs have it alot easier since there is alot more change managment involved before adding any plugin and functionality.   They test on their beta internal blogs instead of the public faing ones.   So the readers aren’t enduring the torture.  In a way I would love to be a wordpress tweaks tester, the one that get paid.   Of course I think paid wordpress testers and tweakers are mythical creatures.   I would more likely run into a garden gnome running around asking people to marry him in the mall then I would a paid wordpress tester.

So for those that read that I don’t create content for because I’m playing a brand new crossposting plugin or life caching function.  I apologize.  I would get help but I can’t seem to find the wordpress tweaking anonymous google group.

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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Posted By Creeva Murkado to Journey To Get Paid at 4/10/2008 06:29:00 AM

Personal writing:

• Holy Cross Posting Web Integration Life Caching Nirvana
• Gnome Conduit – Oh How I Hate to Love You
• coComment and Why It’s Important to Your Life Caching Needs
• Slashdot – Not Really Ready For Data Portability
• Bypassing Your Corporate Firewall Filtering or How to Torture The Firewall Admin
• Feedwordpress – De-Duplication Possible?
• Virtualizing Your Training Environment For Quick Restoration With VMware
• The GFQ5 Story About Creeva
• My Great Internet Data Clean-Up
• Why Can’t We Get Past Race and Gender

Links:

• Creeva’s Daily Link List 02/08/08
• Creeva’s Daily Link List 02/09/08
• Creeva’s Daily Link List 02/10/08
• Creeva’s Daily Link List 02/12/08
• Creeva’s Daily Link List 02/13/08
• Creeva’s Daily Link List 02/14/08

Posts on other Web Services:

• Twitter Updates for 2008-02-08
• Twitter Updates for 2008-02-09
• All Consuming: Creeva 02/10/08
• links for 2008-02-11
• Twitter Updates for 2008-02-10
• coComments by Creeva
• All Consuming: Creeva 02/11/08
• Twitter Updates for 2008-02-11
• coComments by Creeva 02/12/08
• Twitter Updates for 2008-02-12
• coComments by Creeva 02/13/08
• Photos from Creeva 02/13/08
• links for 2008-02-14
• Twitter Updates for 2008-02-13
• links for 2008-02-15
• coComments by Creeva 02/14/08
• Twitter Updates for 2008-02-14
• Twitter Updates for 2008-02-15

There are a couple things I did learn from that encounter.

1.  Not everyone who visits your site cares about you minutia

2.  Your twitter follows don’t want to be notified everytime you add a new post on whatever RSS feed your interacting with

3.  Front pages of blogs get cluttered very quickly this way.

4. Don’t trust miracle plug-ins

So what have I done to fight life caching to be annoying for those that do not care?   I’ve filtered my RSS feed to only include topics that I’m having a first hand interaction with on this blog.   Everything except those categories is blocked from displaying on my front page.  You can still view them underneath the archives or in comments, but the front page remains cleaner.

Moving from a twitter notification plugin to an RSS servive that posts my feed notifcations to twitter lowers stress on my blog post (and stops all those unnecesarry categories from being alerted to over there.   For those that do happen subscribe to multiple feeds from me (hey they may actually exist) won’t have duplicates and duplicate notification.   Finally I don’t trust every wordpress plugin on the block.

Feedwordpress from the hours of pain has been on my poo-list for a while now.   It is taking quite a bit to show trust to this plugin again.   So far I’m testing it for a week on my test blog before it gets moved over to creeva.com.   I do hope it works.   I’ve just been burned in the past and don’t want to have to go through it again.

I’ve written a few articles on life caching.  For those that need to catch up check out this article. For those that don’t need the refresher course, let’s dig in.

What is coComment?

I’ll let them speak for themselves:

coComment keeps track of all the online conversations you’re following in one convenient place, and informs you whenever something is added to a conversation.

coComment will centralize all your conversations in one convenient place so you won’t lose any more contributions you have made on other websites. Stop bookmarking your comments to keep track of them, we will do that for you!

• We will inform you when somebody follows up on your comments, turning the web into a true and reactive global conversation. No need to go back and check on every comment you’ve made to see if the conversation has developed. We’ll let you know!
• Interested in following what people are commenting on? If they’re coComment users, (like heavyweight tech bloggers Pete Cashmore or Robert Scoble), you can follow what they’re saying in the “commentosphere” by checking their comments on their respective pages!
• Keep your conversations organized using tags so you find and follow them more efficiently.

Now why is this useful to you? 

Do you ever post on a blog and say something that comes out so  well written that you wished you saved it?  Do you want to keep track of all the online discussions you participate in?   Do you want to have a copy of all that data you post that Google is going to cache away on their servers? If you said yes to any of the above statements, for the low cost of 19.95 a month….er sorry mindset of what I was saying.  If you said yes then coComment can help you on your journey to maintaining this.

CoComment works as a browser plugin.   Currently I have tested it with Firefox 2.x-3.x and Flock.  Tranparently in the background it looks at the type of web site you are looking at, if you try to make a comment it sends a copy to the coComment servers.   The supported forums/blogs/etc that it supports are:

You participate in many online conversations on blogs and others websites. coComment supports most existing conversational spaces and additionnally lets you start conversations on any webpage:

On blogs and community websites:

• coComment helps you managing existing conversations
• coComment works all major blogging platforms, on services like Digg, Flickr or Youtube and some Forums.
• coComment automatically collects your participations, add conversations to your account, and let you organize them with tags directly from the current page

On conventional websites:

• coComment let you initiate new conversations
• In a single click, every website has now a commenting section
• Being on CNN.com or any other website, feel free to discuss the information.

OK that’s cool it’s another social network based around comments, but what does this have to do with life caching?

The key feature that this does is that it gives you an RSS feed output of all of your comments.   If you are doing a simple life stream application or a full blown life caching that involves archiving all of your data, this allows you the input to save it.   Until EVERYTHING suppors a data portability initiative this is just one more tool to get you closer.

If you decide to try out it, go ahead and add Creeva to your friends list.

Andrew Shuttleworth has written a piece and made a graph of all the online networks he uses and how the information is then passed from web service to web service before being saved on to his own sites (though I still think he cheats since he only posts an RSS widget on his site – hence he lifestreams the data and doesn’t life cache it properly). That being said it’s an insane amount data traversing anywhere and everywhere at once.

The geek in me think it’s one of the most beautiful things to behold. The engineer at me marvels at the design. The system administrator in me gets a headache and a new born ulcer just looking at.

I can say I’m going to be tracing his path one link at a time to see what I have missed, what I can do better, and how I can cache the data that he seems to leave behind. Read Write Web had a piece that directed to this marvel. I can say understand the mashing that will allow you to do this after data portability truly becomes a reality. The real trick though is making it work when this hard not when it is easy. The joy is broken through the pain of accomplishment that is still unique before it becomes the mundane.

It seems my article on life caching struck a chord with someone. I’m glad someone at least shares my understanding on this need. He is just starting to search and find his lifestreaming needs and tools, and this really is the best time to start.

I left him this comment on his site (though his comment system mangled my formatting and I’ve fixed it here):

I’m glad you enjoyed my article – I have a few follow-ups to that article that I need to pound out – such as different ways of actually caching the data. I can say reading a couple of your earlier that you are not late to the life streaming party.

While I agree life streaming is useful, important, and mostly neat. Life caching is the evolutionary transition that will need to occur as the data portability movement takes place. Tools unfortunately to do any type of life caching are terrible at this time. I have some wordpress plugins that I ‘m cutting my PHP learning teeth on that have lots of bugs that I need to streamline – if the object of most of these plugins came from the lifestreaming design instead of spam blog design (repurposing RSS feeds can go both ways) then this small faction of belief in saving our own data can grow.

Dang – sometimes I’m just too long winded.

P.S. Lifestreaming is becoming a verb maybe in a few more years it will be up there with w00t and in the dictionary.

On another one of his posts I left this comment:

I’ll give you the fact that your earlier thoughts on life streaming is correct – it is too much information.

That being said – you need to look at who this is for. Most people don’t care about everything I do and I’ve pruned my RSS feeds that I give to the public down so they only get the useful information.

I archive and save this data for myself – and like the pictures people take of their children growing up, there is never a thing as too much information.

It may be too much information at this point in time – but when personal data mining takes place in a few years as the next hot trend – and archive of this data will be very useful to find trends of different points of your life that you may otherwise forget (or wished you would have forgotten but google reminds everyone anyways).

Over at the lifestream blog the author linked to this original article from here – but while sees usefulness in life caching still believes in the importance of life streaming.   I don’t think you can truly do one without the other, but with this newer concept catching on there is no good way to do it yet.  I left him this comment:

 We can agree to disagree on the importance of life caching – but without accurate and long term archiving of data (life caching) – the lifestream setups most people currently will only be fleeting since most use RSS feeds in a transitional phase of their life stream.  As the RSS feed items expire they are removed from the lifestream.   Even sites like dandelife.com that does the best job of storing data for a lifestream only keeps transitional data from the auxiliary streams and eventually it expires.

I really hope the industry catches up with this idea – I’ll get at least one more of those promised life caching articles out this week.