The Blog as the Hub

Two or three years ago, I was finding the process of writing for my blog increasingly challenging. I no longer had the spare time to write long-form content consistently and I did not feel comfortable just tossing out half-baked ideas. Concurrently, I was spending a tremendous amount of time posting content of smaller lengths on Flickr, Delicious and Twitter. These services had a plethora of third-party tools which made it easy to post content to their platform. While WordPress was working well for me, uploading an image and putting it into a post was not nearly as fast as it was for services like Flickr or Tumblr.

I changed my blog to act as an aggregator of all the sites I posted to. I found the suite of tools to post to services such as Flickr and Tumblr to be far faster and efficient than what I had used for WordPress. I ended up using WP-O-Matic to pull content from all these different services and post them onto my blog. Overnight, I was able to post four to five basic posts a day in roughly 30 minutes. In addition, I was able to foster a community of followers not just on my blog, but on Tumblr, Flickr and Twitter. This was great because it gave readers the flexibility to consume my content whereever they preferred.

I cannot emphasize how well this worked in theory. I had a collection of great third-party tools which were focused to make it extremely easy to post content to a specific service. I would then post across all those services depending on the type of content and WordPress would soon aggregate and publish it on my blog. The diagram shows the basic flow of how content would get published, starting with the tool used to post it, to where the content would originally reside to its eventual aggregation into this blog.

The diagram is pretty simple and, once again, in theory, so was my process. If the tools were sophisticated enough and each inter-connected piece supported each other in an ample manner, I *truly* believe the process would serve as a model for rich media blogging. The problem is, it did not.

Too Many Sacrifices For the Sake of Convenience

WordPress was never truly intended to act as a content aggregator. WP-O-Matic does a lot to make up for that, but there are some insurmountable obstacles that it simply cannot overcome. First and foremost, RSS was simply not the optimal format to pull in the data. Each service I was aggregating from had their own little idiosyncracies of how they chose to format their data in RSS. More often than not, this resulted in some very bizarre titles and copy on my blog.

Another large issue was that I had to make the decision to send content from each service into a separate category that had nothing to do with its subject matter. This meant that Tumblr content would be added to the ‘Tumblr’ category and so on. This resulted in all but worthless categorization for the readers.

The reliance on third-party services also would be problematic at times. Whenever Tumblr would be down, my blog would essentially be at a standstill. This was not frequent, but my heavy reliance on entities that were out of my control proved to be a letdown at times. In addition, formatting of content/media were almost completely out of my control and in the hands of the third-party services, thus tremendously limiting the options I had and the final quality of my posts.

At the core of all these problems though was the fact that my whole process and, for that matter, my whole blog relied on automation from a WordPress plugin. WP-O-Matic was the lynch pin of this concept and when it let me down, I had little to no options. For that reason, even when the plugin clearly had become stale and was not being actively developed, I just crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. There simply were not any other options and my whole process depended on it. This should have been a clear red flag.

The most constant and noticable issue were the duplicate posts. This would happen 2 or 3 times a week and there were times where the duplicates would just keep coming in. If you are a subscriber to this blog, you no doubt have experienced this. I must share my dismay for putting you through that and my surprise that you have stuck it through.

Takeaways

So, after two years of blogging in this manner and ultimately throwing in the towel, what have I learned (the hard way)?

The tools you use should enrich your process not drive them

While still very enamored with pieces of the publishing method, the whole process was driven by the functionality of a WordPress plugin. In retrospect, this limited the quality of content as well as the type of content I would post.

Keep your toolset simple

Reliance on third-party plugins and half-supported applications was my ultimate undoing. At some point, I spent more time massaging the tools than actually using them for their intended purpose. Keep your set of tools small and simple. The more complex and inter-connected your system becomes, the more likely they will eventually fail you.

Automation is great, except for when it isn’t

I cannot tell you how unimpowered it feels to have a system work against you and the only way to make it stop is to pull the plug. I love the concept of automating simple tasks, but it is often not worth the trouble.

Ease of publishing and quality of content need to be balanced

To this day, I firmly believe that making the publishing process easier for yourself will ultimately provide a better experience for the reader. The less hassle it is to create content, the higher likelihood that you will *actually* create content in the first place for your readers. That said, if that easier process comes at the expense of a significant drop in quality, you are defeating the purpose.

Next Steps

This shift in thinking is going to have a significant impact on how I move forward. The redesign that I have been working for is now conceptually defunct. I am trying to determine what is salvagable and what needs to simply be gutted. The blog as it stands will be going through an even more significant transformation behind the scenes. All of the hacks and strange ways I used the blog to make this old process work will have to be removed. It is going to be a lot of work, but it will be well worth it. I learned some really valuable lessons on the way that would never have been as primally understood if I had not gone down this path.

It is a on-going project of creating a piece of generative art each day, using openFrameworks and haXe.

All the pieces are posted in a flickr set and here is a blog post that explains some of the creations.

The Profiler visualizes your online persona by looking through your Facebook, YouTube and Flickr activity. via Web Design Served

Atlas of Flickr geotaggers by Eric Fischer. via FlowingData

Here’s an excerpt:

The Semantic Web will never work because it depends on businesses working together, on them cooperating.

We are talking about the most conservative bunch of people in the world, people who believe in greed and cut-throat business ethics. People who would steal one another’s property if it weren’t nailed down. People like, well, Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch.

And they’re all going to play nice and create one seamless Semantic Web that will work between companies – competing entities choreographing their responses so they can work together to grant you a seamless experience?

I think the author is right about one thing – big business is not a big fan of an open, sharing web and will fight it tooth and nail in the name of profit. My feeling however is that business really does not have a choice in the matter. The web is built on a very open, uncontrollable model – opening up infinite possibilities for individuals, competitors and or startups to ruin them in a heartbeat. The web is moving towards a more open model, like it or not. We do not rely on big business, big business relies on us. If corporations do not want to work in that model, all it takes is $15 for a domain name, $100 a month for hosting and word of mouth for some David to take down Goliath.

The web, since its inception, has been moving towards more a open and communal sense of data. Information and content is shared more than ever on the web. The author is correct in his statement about business – big business has fought it tooth and nail. Nevertheless, the trend towards a more open internet has continued, and if anything, has grown. Not all business is against this movement however – many successful startups have become what they are due to their willingness to share data. The list is too large to fully divulge, but Flickr, YouTube and Digg are three of the most obvious. These companies became what they are today because they shared their content freely and took the user’s experience seriously. Of course, Flickr and YouTube have been purchased by “big business”, but the corporate big-wigs are not dumb – they know that the very success of these sites depends on their open attitude towards information and content. To break those models would surely stifle the success of their newly acquired site and, in turn, stifle their own business. If, for whatever reason, the corporation still decided to do it, there would be numerous sites popping up overnight to try to fill the void.

Most of the true innovation on the internet is not done by big business. Because of the relatively low overhead to start a medium-sized website, very little gets in the way of smart people with smart ideas creating smart web sites. While big business is trying to figure out how they can monetize their web properties, small businesses, startups and individuals are innovating. Of course, many of these innovators will get snatched up by “larger fish” which can lead towards two different directions. The first is that the new owner tries to modify it to their financial agenda. This method has caused many good sites to (very) bad (very) quickly and many times the community does not even stay there long even to witness it. The second direction is that the site gets purchased and is relatively left alone to continue doing what it was doing. YouTube, del.icio.us and Flickr (to a certain extent) seem to fall under that umbrella up to this point. The model opens up the opportunity to slowly move big business towards a more open philosophy. They may not want it, but if the want to compete, they are going to have to eventually.

If the internet was like cable, I would completely agree with the author – however, that is far from the case. Big business accounts for a mere fraction of the content on the internet. With the takeoff of blogging, that fraction is only going to continue to go down. The only advantage business has on the web is money – something that may not be as potent as we think. The majority of successes on the internet have been due to a revolutionary concept, the fostering of a strong community or the publishing of highly desired content. None of these three qualities can come from money alone. Money always helps, but it is not the end-all-be-all. There are even times where I think money could be a hindrance…

I do agree with the author that big business will never volunteer to play nice. The problem is, if they continue to decide to play the way they are playing, the rest of the internet will leave and start their own game.