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Life Aggregator

Created by dave. Last edited by dave, 9 years and 198 days ago. Viewed 3,652 times. #3
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Hi Ferrett

Hi, Ferrett. You don't know me from anyone, but I've been following you on LJ through RSS for… well, for a while now. Don't remember how I found you, maybe through your essays on fanfic… yeah, maybe that rings a bell.

Anyways, you joined Twitter. And your >>first post, if I may be so bold as to quote you in your entirety, was this:

I am searching for the Unifying Cross-Post Theory, where one post to any social network is disseminated across all of them simultaneously.

The Answer

Don't. Aggregation should be a consumer problem, not an author problem.

Oh, more details? Sure.

One of the things that bugs me is when authors use services to announce posts on other services. "I've just posted to LJ!" they'll tweet. Or they'll write a 200-character LJ post about their 80-character tweet. And if I am not subscribed to both services, then maybe that's appropriate, however the end point of such a post is the author saying I'm also posting over here, come read me!… and after I am, then I'm getting bombarded with duplicate posts. And if I don't care about your twittering, then I'm getting annoyed with content I don't care about.

(Which I do, for right now anyways.)

Aggregation is a consumer problem. It is up to me, the consumer, to decide which parts of The Ferrett's Menu Of Fine Content I wish to read. If I like the LJ stuff, then I'll read the LJ stuff. If I want the twitter stuff, I'll read the twitter stuff.

And the best part is that most, if not all, services today provide the raw feeds to make consumer aggregation easy: RSS.

So what I do is I drop your twitter feed's RSS into my Google Reader, along with the RSS from your LJ. That means that every time you have something profound to say, Google will come along within 24 hours and drop it into my reader, where I can read it, or not, at my leisure.

And if you get boring or excessively noisy or unpleasantly challenging to my state of self worth (or whatever), the RSS feed can be dropped just as easily.

The Menu

But it is always appropriate to point people at a complete menu, as it were, of content that you are producing. That way your fans can decide where (or if) they want to be following your production.

For that you want an RSS aggregator of your own. My personal choice is to have a home page detailing what I write where, and The Planet, which is a self-hosted aggregator. (See the sidebar for a link to mine, >>Planet Xdroop). This is where people can go to get a list of, and taste of, the drivel I inflict on the internet; and from there they can decide what or if they want from me.

Thanks for reading

Anyways, that's just one consumer's thoughts on the matter.

Thanks for your past writings, you are a good writer and that's why I read you.

Cheers, Dave.

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This is a collection of techical information, much of it learned the hard way. Consider it a lab book or a /info directory. I doubt much of it will be of use to anyone else.

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