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View as: | Webpage | Doc | Activity Feed |

An Update on my experiment with content Distribution

I think that the biggest challenge I've run into while trying to lock into methods for distributing content is that the services I use are constantly changing, or new services are always popping up so I have to change my rules. In some ways, this is good because as services like Scribd or Google+ become better my experiment becomes better. But, I often lose one or two advantages each time I gain a convenience. The core belief which drives the rest of my methods has changed the same, however. The key to distributing content across the Internet is to look at everything in three parts: Webpage, document, and activity feed. When you publish something as at least a webpage and a document, you are providing it in just about every format that a reader would ever need. The Activity Feed is the glue that holds everything together, no matter how many places you publish your content.

Webpage
I'm not using the term "webpage" literally. It could mean Google Docs, a blog, etc. Basically anything that depends mostly on HTML and that your reader would view on their screen. Originally, I was starting in Google Docs when I composed my articles but now I'm creating them in Posterous and then copying-and-pasting them into a new document on Google. Not preferable, but easier than doing it in the reverse way. This way, I am offering the article in at least two web-based formats. I've also started to share my posts on Facebook and Twitter using Posterous' autopost feature. This is a bit of a compromise, but necessary because it simplifies my process. I was running into trouble posting links on Facebook/Twitter which led directly back to my Google Docs.

Document
Primarily this refers to the Google Doc version of any article that I write. When I am done, I will make reading and commenting available to the public. Since offering up my article this way, I have noticed that there are a good number of people who view my google docs. I don't have any exact numbers. I would also count Scribd in this category, although I don't include it in the list of three links which I consider to be the "holy trinity" of content publishing. It's just easier to link back to the different formats within Google Docs than to send readers all over.

Activity Feed
This was the trickiest part of the equation, and I'm still fine tuning this idea. I needed some place where I could post a description, and then a constant feed of updates pointing readers to the different places where they could view an article in its different formats. For example, the article 1

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View as: | Webpage | Doc | Activity Feed | that you are reading now might have been uploaded to Google Docs and Scribd, and linked from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest. There are three things that a reader will want to do: read the article, download it (scribd), share it (all of the above), or comment on it (primarily the social media sites). The activity feed represents information which allows them to do it, plus I knew that I would want them to be able to comment right there within the activity feed. Initially, I had been using Trello to maintain these activity feeds. Trello is a great tool, and I had hoped that I could have stuck with it but it didn't offer enough flexibility. Also, visitors needed to join Trello before they could post comments, so that was a disadvantage. I very much wanted to make Google+ the home of my documents' activity feed, but it still didn't offer me enough flexibility. I also needed a platform which kept the activity feeds separate from my distribution channels, which includes Google+. I hadn't used Google Groups for a while, so when I happened across this product a week ago I began to realize that this could serve as a home for my activity feeds. The list of forum posts resembles an activity feed somewhat, and I could easily link to the individual posts from the different documents. Google Groups also gives me editing controls, plus the group can be made as public as I need it to be, so no need for visitors to join or sign in before they post their responses. For example, the activity feeds for The Stack are stored here. I called this the "glue," but this group serves as both an archive and flight control for everything that happens as I develop and distribute the different articles.

My Process
My process, as it stands now, is to write the article inside my blog on Posterous, then copy the text and paste them into a new Google Doc. Posting on Facebook, Twitter, and several other blogs is handled through Posterous' autopost feature. Also, before the blog post goes live I include links at the bottom which will take the user to different formats of the same article. The links represent the web version (Google's "published on the web"), document (Google Doc), and the activity feed. From there, it doesn't matter how many different formats I save the article in or how many services I use, because there is always the reference to the article's core parts.

Maintenance
One important element which I hope to smooth out is what I would consider to be the "mainentance" mode of a given article. This is where I might continue to make continual changes to a post or article. How do I report on this? My plan is for the activity feeds to serve as a type of log, where I would make a note whenever I make an improvement to the content. And, I'm hoping to only make changes to the Google Docs. One of the main purposes of this experiment is to find a way to easily maintain posts or articles. I'd love to be able to update and manage every single format of a piece of content, but this

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View as: | Webpage | Doc | Activity Feed | would just be too time consuming. So, I try to see the content in two different categories: Living document, and released to the wild. Anything that is web-based could be considered to be the latter category. I've posted this post to my blog, for example, so unless there is a typo or factual error I wouldn't want to make a lot of changes. Anything that is document-based would be considered to be a living document, and even then I would only worry about the Google Doc version. Scribd and other document hosting sites offer the ability to post comments, so I might post a comment when a document changes drastically, but readers could click on the activity feed link in order to read updates. Given the nature of document hosting, however, I probably would upload revisions.

Publishing beyond the trinity

Once content has been "out there" for a while, I would hope to take it to the next level of publishing, which I think of as publication in an e-zine or a book. For a lack of a better term, these would serve as compilations of a few weeks' worth of published articles. I might take a look at the comments posted on different networks, make changes, and then include an article in a published collection of some kind. My goal is that by the time an article is included in a collection it has been improved enough to be considered almost a version 2 or revision 2 of the original blog post. The activity feed would continue to track the article as it is included in different collections.

Conclusions (for now)

My next step will be to produce a flow of documents and move them through the different phases just to see how well all of this works together. So far, my switch to Google Groups for the actviity feed has seemed like a strong decision, and of course Facebook, Google+, etc., remain as dependable as they always are. The only other element I'm counting on is my audience. First of all, I do need people to read the documents that I post, and I'm seeing that happen on all of the different services and networks. Second, I need to get a portion of my audience to post feedback, which doesn't happen that often. Through a review of the feedback I will be able to make an article better. Also, the big questions that remains of course is how could this be applied to an already existing publishing operation? I think that the methods I've been researching speak to the fact that it is very hard to publish content across the Internet without first organizing some kind of flow or pattern for your work. The good news is that most businesses now already maintain a blog. The question they should be asking themselves is where they want their content to go after it has been published on the blog, and how do they want to reach their audience? I can't answer for everybody, but I think that the next step in the evolution for any piece of content is the ebook, or some kind of curated collection. This allows you to catch the segment of your audience or customer base that might not have been reading your blog, but still wants to learn about you.

A little bit of Review

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View as: | Webpage | Doc | Activity Feed | I know that I've convered this in previous blog posts, but I wanted to review some of the other concepts that I've talked about prior to this blog post/article. None of what I've described here is possible until you begin to look at content as their smallest form. This might be the article or the blog post. The methods I've described above are based around the idea of moving or converting the content at the smallest level. This might seem contrary, because we often look at content as only its whole--such as a book, magazine, etc. The best way to approach this new thinking is to think about the modeal for music and CD's. A song artist records their song, and then the song is released as a single. The same song is later included on a full album, and if its popular would be included in a Best of compilation. Maybe the song is later featured in a movie, so its included on the soundtrack. We are not singers, but we are still artists. I'm writing this blog post, someone else takes a photo, and so on. The question that remains for us once we're done with our work is how can we best distribute it? Following the song model, we would share it as an article or post, inlcude it in a collection later, then publish it in a book, and then share it amongst other writers' work.