May | 19 | 2007

PRESENCE is the new black

Posted by Jeff as Community Building, Linking, Opinion, Syndication

To have the blogger’s mindset is to analyze and think about the best ways to present, initiate and encourage discussion on ideas that may first appear as irrelevant together and not worth thinking over. In the months I started pushing web content, I unconsciously developed a rather anal-retentive process as to which ideas make their way into my writing - both offline and online - that involves going through three levels: micro-blogging (Twitter), something I’ll call draft-blogging (Tumblr - then it becomes tumblelogging), and then there’s the full-fledged personal blog.

It’s nice to leaves small traces of your celebrity self all over the web, but this is a practice best left to experimenting kids and teens. Those who wish to build a solid branding around their sites more often than not employ a central portal for disparate locations. There’s leoville for Leo Laporte’s multitude of sites, Engadget branching out to engadgetmobile and engadgetHD, among others. With the idea of presence (which more and more Web 2.0 services are jumping on now) already gaining popularity, Jaiku goes beyond mere short-form posts and positions itself as the ultimate center of all your web activity. Here you can pull posts from, say your Wordpress blog, your tumblelog, and your Twitter updates as they come, and then throw in pictures from your Flickr account and your last.fm updates.

Yahoo! Pipes on the other hand, lets you set up more complex, filtered queries, but requires knowledge of the Pipes system. Still beats coding from scratch when all you want is to set up a compilation of all your posts across all your contributor blogger stints.

More loosely, the idea of presence may not be solely limited to mashing up multiple RSS feeds into one point of contact. Consider the May 2007 update to the Xbox 360 which fully integrates Xbox Live messaging with Windows Live Messenger, which in turn is integrated with Yahoo’s own network. I can set my Xbox up such that whenever I go on to play a quick Bejeweled on Live Arcade, my MSN and Yahoo contacts will also see me get online for a quick chat (painful with an on-screen keyboard and that which I try to stay away from).

As we move to the age where location is not an issue we see more of these services integrating and thankfully, to our benefit, are mostly free to use, and build our brands around, and a solid branding certainly cannot hurt any content producer. #

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