Eric Rice mixes his media
Posted: June 13, 2005 Filed under: Blogging 1 Comment »Looks like Eric’s having the same problems I am. I posted about this to the videoblog list a while back. How should I present my content to my users? Should my videos go one place and my blog another? How do my users, which are blog readers and videoblog watchers, get my content? They’re two different audiences aren’t they?
In the end, I’ve decided to leave it all up here at clintsharp.com. Eric looks like he’s going to be using his blog as a pointer to where he exists other places. That’s a pretty good idea, and I might end up doing the same. I’m setting up a wiki on my site as well as a place to put my well-formed ideas and a place where people can edit those, refine them, and make suggestions. Blogs are just poor content management systems for anything than what they were originally intended to be, which was a log of what you found on the web.
So, in the end, mix your media I think. Throw it all together, mash it up, let the consumers sort it out. If it’s too messy, we’ll clean it up later. Your subscribers are coming to see about you, and if I’m interested in reading what someone has to say I’m also interested in watching what they vlog and listening to what they podcast. That’s the beauty of the blogopodovlogopshere. It’s about individuals and authenticity. Way to go Eric! Best of luck.
Dude, I like it. I’ve never been a fan of the way Eric and Steve Garfield split their blog / vlog / and podcasts into separate blogs altogether, but I very much respect and understand why. It’s because aggregators are NOT smart enough yet to manage news, podcasts, and video seperately. For that matter when they started podcasting and video blogging neither were the primary blog packages capable of handling the special needs of such media rich content.
However, that said I’m very much in agreement with Andreas of solitude.dk on this and I think I hear his ideas echo’d in yours. “Mix your media”. I think Worpress and Typepad are now smart enough that you can split a single channel rich media blog into the following feeds so aggregators can handle them.
news feed
video feed
podcast feed
complete feed
Let’s not forget all the comments feeds.
That would be my recomendation. The hope being that in the future as aggregators get smarter you can gradually phase out everything but the complte feed, but I’d love to here more from Steve, Eric and Andreas.
Ironically I personally have two blogs.
mmeiser.com/blog
mmeiser.com/backchannel
This is NOT because of media. It’s because of a shortcomings in blogger.com. Specifically that I like to write things out in a long format and unlike WordPress and Moveabletype, Blogger.com does not support extended posts. It displays the WHOLE post on the home page of the blog even if it’s 5,000+ words.
Therefore I use the backchannel as both a link blog and an extended post blog. That said, my backchannel has become more or less irrelevant. And I will probably discontinue it after I move from blogger to WordPress. I’m using it less and less because del.icio.us has picked up my link-blogging needs with a little help from feedburner’s “link splicer” feature.
Meanwhile I like you am moving my longer articles to a wiki where they can live and grow and change as articles without choking my blog. Partly this was inspired by Joi Ito’s wiki and Clay Shirky’s old website and blog which are still online (http://www.shirky.com/) though I don’t think it’s still in use as he’s now moved on to writing for a payed publication, the Corante Many-2-Many blog: http://www.corante.com/many
Personally I can’t wait to see how the wiki works with public contributions. In the future I may have to block general public contributions, or actually have multiple wikis or section of the wiki with various levels of “opneness”. However, I’m aiming to keep it as open as possible for as long as possible. It IS by it’s nature an experiment.
However, i digress. While all that is interesting what we’re talking about is media. I keep all my media in my primary blog feed. I’ve had tremendous sucess mixing videos into longer articles. For example Peter (of mefeedia fame) very much like my mixed media post about 37signals backpackit webservice as did a few others.
http://www.poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2005/05/06/2658/
In summary I put all my videos and mutimedia through my main feed. It is available in both Atom and RSS2.0 though I don’t see much of a need for Atom anymore as the RSS 2.0 feed provided by feedburner can be subscribed to in either a news reader and/or an video aggregator like FireANT. Both provide different experiences and I’d like to think that users find value in subscribing both ways.
On a side note I’ve seen another aproach being used by Phil Torrone and Ross Mayfield. They’re using Flickr as yet another viewing perspective to their primary blogs. I’m a huge fan of this very visual alternative to news reading. (I myself am a very “visual” thinker, as are most I think.)
While this Flickr feed is still very much experimental as a means for viewing a blog I find a very refreshing and useful option. As they say a picture is worth a thousand words. Here’s a couple examples of Flickr photos being used as an alternative viewing mechanism to a blog.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ross/18604551/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rene/18626402/
Phil’s whole flickr feed is a pointer for the Make blog. It’s a GREAT experimental alternative for browsing the Make Blog. I actually find Phils Flickr feed more fun than reading the Make blog itself. Granted I only read Make for fun so I’m not worried about missing anything, otherwise I’d probably not depend soley on Phil’s flickr feed.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pmtorrone/
Not that I’m worthy of comparison to the almighty Phil, but I do think my blog’s Flickr feed is an interesting visual map of my blog also. Unfortunately I’ve not linked the photos in to the blog posts… yet.
http://flickr.com/photos/mmeiser/
One day I hope to make a big 20×30 “life poster” of my flickr feed (and maybe on of Make Magazine’s too.) “Life posters” are a beautiful thing. Perhaps I’ll make a calendar for 2006 with my 2005 photos.
Though, I think you’d probably find my personal Flickr photo blog much more interesting.
http://flickr.com/photos/mmeiser2/
A friend who’s a professional photog in London actually suggested I could become a professional photogrpaher based of my flickr account. I was shocked and flattered that she thought so highly of my snapshots, but as I pointed out to her, I’d have to upgrade my 2 megapixel / $150 Cannon a60 to a real camera like the Nikon a70 or Canon D series and get a couple lenses and in the end those aren’t so easy to carry around in your pocket. ANyway, joking a side the suggestion I could actually get payed to do something I love has thrown me into a bit of a tail spin.
Anyway, wow, that’s me blathering again.
-Mike of mmeiser.com/blog