ergophobe - 4:44 pm on Apr 17, 2008 (gmt 0)

>>I don't get why people don't get this?

ReceptionalAndy covered this matter fully ;-)

>>we're just grumpy old so-and-sos

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>>signed up for multiple services

That part I get. My question was more specific and most people keep answering the question I didn't ask. So, yes, I see the value and I fully understand why you would want to broadcast to multiple services, even when they overlap, like Facebook/MySpace or Flickr/Smugmug/YouTube/. That makes sense. Not everyone in my Facebook network will have a MySpace account and vice-versa.

The part I didn't get, and for the most part still don't, is sending the same content to multiple blogs simultaneously. Blogs are different, you don't have to be a member of any network at all to read the dailykos.com or perezhilton.com or mattcutts.com (none of which I read, as it turns out, which speaks to their popularity).

As I say, I suspect that capability exists just because it makes for a simpler interface, but I could be wrong. Certainly nothing anyone has said makes me see the value of sending the same article to multiple blogs (not Twitter, FB, MS, Flickr, or what have you, but multiple blogs).

>>Stop thinking like a SEOer

Forget Google. The truth is, that for my blogs, I don't give one wit about Google, but I do care about duplicate content, content that can be found in multiple places. To some degree, my blogs are for networking and I've actually made some pretty good friends from people who've written in (I mean people who have come and stayed at my house and such).

Why do I think posting the same content to multiple blogs is bad for social networking? It fractions your community and makes it harder, not easier to connect. Think about comments for a moment. If I post the same content to ergophobeBlog.com, ergophobe.blogspot.com, ergophobe.typepad.com and ergophobe.blogger.com, I have now split my commenting community in four. Makes no sense.

Then there's focus. Even if I personally ran dailykos.com, perezhilton.com *and* mattcutts.com by myself, how many mattcutts.com readers would want to junk up their RSS readers with my PerezHiltion stuff? Personally, when I follow blogs, beyond a certain point, the more someone posts, the more likely I am to unsubscribe.

On the other hand, having the Six Apart app be able to send to several blogs does make sense because one day I may post something on Flickr that I want to flag on my personal blog, and the next day I put something on Flickr that might interest people who subscribe to my Three-Legged Dachsund blog. The ability to post to both simultaneously is just a side-effect, I suspect.

Of course, what I would really like to see is the opposite - a "pull" technology that would allow *me* to *subscribe* to a *person*. Whether she adds content to her professional blog, her personal blog, her Facebook page or her Flickr stream, it shows up in my Mahalia Jackson feed (okay, she's been dead for 36 years, but you get the idea).

Essentially, this is email, and what I would like to see is RSS. This is a shotgun, and I'm waiting for a telescope.