Webmasters Journal

View as: | Pressbook | Google | Activity Feed |

Blogging without Borders

I have been thinking. Ive reached a point in my content experiment where I believe I have a pretty good balance between control and distribution. I am composing my articles (or essays, etc.) inside Google Docs, and then posting them to three primary services: Pressbooks, Posterous, Google (as a published webpage), and Scribd. Im also maintaining an activity log inside FogBugz, and publishing the activity information inside a public project I started in Lighthouse. When I publish the documents, Im including just three links: a link to the Pressbook site, Google webpage, and the activity feed. Im also sharing links to the content beyond these links using Posterous autopost feature. This includes Google+, Facebook, and Twitter. I have a general plan to use FogBugz to produce a publication which would basically be one long index. It would contain a list of titles, summaries, and links to the main destinations where the reader could read a specific piece of content. Im choosing to go this route because this seems like the easiest and fastest way to generate a collection of links to content. Im going to export tables from FogBugz, import them into Google Docs, and then publish them as weekly issues of The Stack. I think that I can keep writing three or four pieces of content and publish them once a week as an index. This would be the closest Ive come to podcasting my written content. Once Ive built up the content, Ill be able to re-organize the articles into actual ebooks or ezines. Pressbooks allows me to easily export blog posts as an ebook, but Im not sure if I am going to use that feature. I am using Pressbooks to curate my work, however. The Stacks new home will be at http://thestack.pressbooks.com and Ive started other pressbooks sites for other titles. One of the ideas behind my experimenting has been blogging without borders. When I began using Lighthouse and Fogbugz to catalog the content I created, I began to compare this new method to the way blogs work. Basically, when you post to Wordpress your article is stored in a database and assigned an ID. When visitors arrive on your blog, they are shown the most recent posts, or they can click on a link in order to read a blog post in, say, the archive. The link points them to the post based on its ID. My goal has been to create a system which isnt tied to just one service or medium. My theory is that ubiquitous content gives the reader and publisher more options when it comes to format, medium, platform, and distribution. This can be done by creating a record in some database--I chose Lighthouse--which gives information about a piece of content, and then points to all of its locations on the Internet. The reader, then, has the choice of how they would like to view or interact with the content. In a way, I would be building a blog system that is above all blog systems. Thanks to the web, content is never static, nor do I want it to be. I know that after I release this article, I will (hopefully) get comments and responses which will force me to revisit it and make some revisions. Therefore, each piece of content needs an activity feed or log which captures the most important changes. This isnt new; Ive seen a lot of documentation which contained a

Webmasters Journal
View as: | Pressbook | Google | Activity Feed | table with notes about what changes were made to it and by whom. Im talking about those kinds of changes, plus any notes about where the document was shared over the web. Each content record would contain an activity feed, but all of the records would also form a list of all of the content that has been created, like a catalog. This would be the uber blog that I talked about above. What does this mean for content? Im not sure. But, this does support my initial theory that content is better served--and distributed--when it is treated as individual entities instead of parts of a whole. My uber blog idea isnt that different from the phonebook, or computer catalogs, the IMDB website, or iTunes. All it is doing is freeing up the content that is on record so that it can be easily organized into collections. iTunes has playlists, for example, and the collections of content on the Uber Blog could be called reading lists. I do think that this is the direction that content will be going. Until now, we have associated content with the publication or container that it arrived in--the USA Today, New York Times, etc. But, thanks to the Internet, and apps like Flipboard, people are now able to ignore the borders between different publications and customize the way that they receive their content. This isnt to say that publishers are less relevant--readers will still prefer to get their news and information from trusted sources. They are just going to get it in more of a personalized hodge podge. As publishers, we need to be ready to prepare our content for this coming shift in the way that content is delivered. My approach has been to treat myself as a brand, and each one of my articles as a separate product--much like a song produced by a music artist--and then see how I could best sell each product. One key thing that Ive been able to do is set up each article so that it links the reader back to me--either a blog, or a social feed--so that I can make a connection and hopefully build a relationship. What are some ways that this approach could help the way that you distribute your content or connect with your audience? How would an Uber Blog help to synchronize different social media properties under one, combined campaign? Project Hover, the initiative under which I write all of my content, was started with the hopes of answering questions like the above. I invite you to follow me (@morga2ja) and maybe even work with me as I continue to explore these new ways of producing and distributing content.