Thursday, April 3, 2008

How I Publish



I've been wanting to do this for a while, but I finally got around to it. Here is the picture, as of this afternoon, that indicates how I publish various material to the web.

Let's start with the fact that many of the things that I publish can be accessed from just two points: FriendFeed and MyBlogLog. If you go to my FriendFeed page or my MyBlogLog page, you can access much of my other content, either by viewing it in a stream or by clicking on a button to get to the content. The two services also add content (FriendFeed comments, MyBlogLog communities) to the original content.

As you can see, some of my content is available on FriendFeed, some on MyBlogLog, and some on both. I have to confess that I could probably add some items to both services, but just haven't done so yet. (However, last I checked, I cannot add my MySpace stream to FriendFeed.)

Of course, you don't have to go to FriendFeed or MyBlogLog to see my public stuff - you can go directly to any of the dozen-plus services that I have listed; all of their pages are publicly accessible. In fact, there are sometimes some good reasons for skipping the aggregators - for example, if you think that I am the best photographer in the universe, but that you really hate my choices in music listening, go directly to Flickr instead of FriendFeed.

One of the things that you can see in my FriendFeed is my Google Reader Shared Items. That stream, of course, is populated by the things that I read in Google Reader. This is where you start to see the dividing line between the public me and the private me. I've illustrated one example here; one of my feeds consists of updates from my LinkedIn network. For a variety of reasons, I choose not to share that with the public. Similarly, I read a number of items that are specific to my vertical market. Again, for a variety of reasons, you can't see my interest in these items unless you're behind my corporate firewall.

While this graphic illustrates the technological connections between the various services, it does not illustrate the other connections between these services. If you haven't figured it out by now, a lot of the things that I blog about here and in mrontario are based upon things that I read in Google Reader, and then place in my Google Reader Shared Items. Obviously, I'll sometimes blog about other things, but to tag them I'll put them in my StumbleUpon blog, or in another source. (I have quit using del.icio.us because I encountered massive speed problems with it.)

The graphic also doesn't address how I get things into the various services. All services can be accessed from my home desktop or my work laptop computer, and I also have ways to publish to some of these services from my mobile phone. Some examples:

  • I use m.twitter.com to tweet from my mobile phone.

  • If I take a picture on my mobile phone, I can use mobile Gmail to send it to Flickr and to one of my two Blogger blogs.

  • MySpace offers some limited capabilities for connecting to my MySpace friends.
So this covers how I publish.

But I haven't addressed why I publish.

[mrontemp business] | [mrontemp politics] | [mrontemp technology] | [mrontemp del.icio.us tags]

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2 comments:

Ontario Emperor said...

The graphic above is now outdated. I just added StumbleUpon, Upcoming, and Yelp to my MyBlogLog profile. As a matter of fact, I also added FriendFeed to my MyBlogLog profile.

MaryAnn Chick Whiteside said...

Interesting explanation. Thanks for sharing it on Louis Gray's site