Recently I’ve been wondering if “cross posting” is good, evil or just another tool.
I guess maybe there are probably two different classifications for which the same word is used. I think it’s fine if a few people want to collaborate on a site and cross post SOME of their entries. For example I post about Japan and about games and game development so if some of my entries made it on a shared site about Japan or a shared site about games that seems okay to me.
On the other hand, lately I’ve noticed a tread among my several of my friends to run mulitple blogs all with exactly the same content. They sign up at blogger.com, msn spaces, xanga, live journal etc and might also run an MT or WP blog and they feel compelled to post all their entries to all of them. I feel like that is almost wrong. While obviously it’s not like an actual crime, taken to the extreme people would sign up for thousands of sites and post the same stuff to all of them which would arguably cause some problems for search engines as well as just clutter the net more than it is. It’s almost like spaming the net with your opinions and it seems like it could escalate. The guy that has 100 copies of his blog is more likely to have more “voice” than the guy that has 1, everything else being equal so there would be pressure to run as many as possible.
It’s not just that finding your post on the net several times might muck up with page rankings, it’s also cluttering the net. A search engine needs to crawl the entire net to index the info that’s out there. For every person that has multiple copies of their blog up it’s got to scan their posts once for each blog meaning it will take longer for it to crawl everything meaning it will get harder and harder to keep up all because some people feels the need to shout. This is the NET. A simple link from your MSN spaces profile to your main website is all you need. It saves you time (only having to post once). It saves the net from clutter. It’s not like your asking people to drive to another store. It’s also better for you. Having 9 people link to one individual post of yours is ranked higher by most search engines than having 9 people link, 3 each, to 3 difference sites you are on.
As I was thinking about this I showed someone that does this my new blog posting software I’ve been working on and the first feature he requested was cross positing since he always posts to 3 or 4 blogs. As I was designing it, including the ability, per blog, to tell it where the images are stored, I started thinking maybe I shouldn’t be putting this feature in as it only encourages what I consider bad behavior. If I leave it without that feature you can still click “publish” for each blog. If I put that feature in it will only encourage having as many blogs as possible because with one click you’ll be able to spam your opinion on as many blogs as you have in your list.
Does anyone have any opinions or read any good articles pro or con about this phenomenon?
I can understand cross-posting on a few different sites, but having a lot more they’re seeking publicity and attention. It kind of sunds like the heavily cross-posters seem seek sme sort of validation that what they type is of use? Simplistic view, sure. I found your site becasue I’m interested in Japan and games, so I can understand cross-posting on say this site, a Japan-specific site or a game-specific site. If that makes any sense.
Cross posting a Japanese post to a your own blog and a Japanese blog or a Game post to your own blog and another game related blog is arguably defendable. These friends though are not cross-posting, they are wholesale copying their entire blogs 2, 3 or 4 times on the net.
Even cross-posting single posts though it can be argued it would be better to post just an except to the original post on the other blogs. That way there’s one place for the “current” version incase any revisions are made. It also means comments will more likely be in one place as well.
So looks like I missed the point (and the correct spelling). I think what you’ve just said makes sense, and I still think that posting the same blog on different sites is still pretty much attention seeking, maybe for validiation of some sort.
I like the look and feel of your site. Do you have a version of your publishing software available for beta-testing? What OS does it run on?
I agree that cross-posting is a form of spam. To use a metaphor from signal processing, the signal to noise ratio of the internet is decreased each time someone cross-posts. – the ratio of useful information to clutter is decreased. As the signal gets buried in the noise, it becomes more an more difficult to detect it. The noise on the internet is becoming deafening. The signal is receding further and further into the background.
On other hand, as the signal to noise ratio in general on the internet decreases, the value of truly entertaining and informative sites like yours increases.
Curiosity Question: What hardware and OS are you running?
Not only does it seem pretty tedious to post to all those different places, but comments on each would be fractured. Since the spread of people that come to your site is distributed among all the incarnations of your blog, there would be little, if any, discussion…
I run custom software and it’s mostly spagetti. It started off in fairly unstructured perl. Some parts, like the comment system are much better written although it is not separable. Still, perl (not mod_perl) is pretty heavy for the server so a couple of months ago I added a PHP cache detecting filter. It checks if the cache is up to date and if so just serves the cached page. Otherwise it just passes the request on to the old perl code. That way, for most requests, just the PHP is used which I’m sure makes my ISP a lot happier.
There’s really almost nothing about this site that you couldn’t do in moveabletype or wordpress. You’d just have to spend time setting them up and formatting them. I think the only feature mine has that their’s don’t is multiple language content for the same entry. Now that both of them run some PHP they can do the other things my site does like auto detecting browsers and serving different styles for each browser etc.
The point of crossposting – at least for me, is the way my blog has evolved.
When I first started blogging, it was 100% LiveJournal, and thus a great deal of my friends are integrated into that friends list. The sandbox comment system cuts down on MT spam, and I know most of the people who read my blog go through there. That being said, I like MT and I want to be able to have a pretty version of my blog on MY site, for those who don’t know me and stumble across my writings that way. If I just put a link to the MT blog on LiveJournal, it would completely eliminate the comments I get because of MT spam. If I only post on LJ, then my cool unconformant style-sheet will be for nothing.
I can understand your point about the “unfairness” of posting many times on many blogs. However, I actually found your post while looking for a Xanga crossposting plugin for Wordpress. I think Xanga crossposting falls into a different category because of the way Xanga is set up. Xanga’s architecture (probably purposely) tends to exclude blogs outside the Xanga itself. Many “Xangans” only read updates when they appear as updated in their subscriptions. I used to use Xanga but have since switched to Wordpress on my own server. However, since most of my friends are still on Xanga and they forget to check blogs outside of Xanga, my readership has gone down. By crossposting, I can revive my prior audience. Also, because of Xanga’s interior linking structure, it is not spidered by most search engines, including Google.