Category Archives: Sync and centralize

Brand Management – Branding Yourself

Journey To Get Paid wants to bring you into the world of brand management.

Now the first thing to know as a blogger that you are your brand. Whatever you do positive or negative effects your brand in tremendous ways. It also effects your SEO in a way also, but I’ll get to that towards the end. You have to decide how you want yourself as a blogger to be perceived. If you want a spam blog that may or may not generate yourself a ton of money please stop now because some of the things I’m going to explain is just going to out you quicker to the general population.

You as a blogger is the primary asset for your brand, that being said if you have a collaborative blog, that blog in itself is a brand name and the authors are their own brand names. If you are insightful, engaging, humorous, or interesting you can gain an audience. The audience you wish to reach depends on yourself. The blog I’m going to use for example is my personal blog at creeva.com. This blog is the core of my internet persona (ironically not really the core of my journey to getting paid but my core nonetheless). Where ever I post across the blog-o-verse I cross post the article to my home blog. This allows ease of backup and exposure to the few people that take interest in me.

For those that don’t care about the fluff or personal lamenting I have the on topic blogs I work on (journeytogetpaid.com) this immediately separates readers from the two brands I wish to confer on to them, the brand of myself as a blogger compared to the brand of one of the blogs that I write. This allows for a more personal dynamic of engagement between yourself and your readers. You should always be personal – but I’ll never get asked if my cat is feeling better at journeytogetpaid.com.

Honing into the fact that you are your own brand management (Scobel is king of self-brand management) you have to target your own peer group. This includes allowing other methods for readers and friends to contact you. This gives multiple levels of engagement where you still have some control over the boundaries. I went from google telling me “did you mean cirev?” when I did a search for creeva – to the fact now that I have over 6k hits on that name. Is that good? Well my friends can find me through all the various services I use – or the can engage me at my home blog with aggregates the data from far and wide.

Let’s take this story I’m writing right now. When this is published it will be published on journeytogetpaid.com and crossposted to journeytogetpaid.blogspot.com (google crawls itself first hence the blogspot mirror) and creeva.com. You may think that is the end of i, but far from it. At creeva.com I allow my friends to read me from whatever social network they use and wish to follow me on. Here is a run down to what happens when this story is crossposted and published over at creeva.com.

Creeva.com crossposts to the following sites

My livejournal which in turn syncs with my dandelife account

My Vox

My MSN Spaces

My Old Blogspot Site

My Xanga Site

It also through RSS feeds goes to these sites:

Sends an alert to my twitter readers

Sends a notification as a blog entry into my myspace blog

Cross posts into my facebook profile

Archives as a line in my old tumblr account that I don’t know what I’m going to do with

Archives to my old suprglu account that I used to use as my lifestream.

Theoretically before anyone reads this article it will be published 13 places. This is also before the spammers get to it and repurpose it for their own means. My wife says she is going to blame me when the internet crashes. Behind the scenes there is even a bit more that goes on, but that really isn’t publicly accessible since it has nothing to do with branding.

Why do I do this?

Different people know me at different places, but my writing is all me and I wish to share that with all of them. I’m not as bad as some. I actually at one point crossposted every song I listen to, thankfully I’m more selective at what I crosspost at this time. It’s more relevant to what is going on and family and friends can have different levels of engagement with m.

I also use many activity specific type sites like flickr and digg which I don’t cross post to but have a level of engagement with other users there. But of course my profile links back to my main site. Whenever I crosspost I also include links back to where he article was originally published at. This allows readers to traceback and find the information at teh correct source. I use no subterfuge or magic mirrors to hide what I’m doing. It’s all plain as day.

Seeing this is my journey to get paid I’m sure your wondering how I can monetize all these sources?

In short – I can’t, but passing the message and advertising myself to those that show interest hopefully have them trace back to the original article. If not I have methods of importing comments from these diverse locations into creeva.com. So if you leave a comment on my facebook account or my flickr account it get pulled back into creeva.com. This allows full engagement with my readers and what they have to say.

So all I have to do to be popular is push myself out everywhere at once?

No, if your not interesting and don’t have any friends now, propagating your information will not help you get anymore. If your not clear on your intentions or your readers think your being shady it can back fire on you. It can get you on the dreaded spammer list in people’s minds. Yes I could theoretically start 2000 blogspot domains and crosspost to all of them, but I don’t. I just maintain the links I already have in the communities that I already exist. I’ll migrate the method in which I interact with a service by sourcing material from the one I primarily use, but I don’t abandon the community I left behind.

This of course in some ways hurts me from a monetary perspective – but my branding gets better and recognition improves. You will always have to write something people wish to read if you want to gain a steady and growing following instead of single SEO tricks to get people to click links without giving them any substance (that’s cheating). Work on your own writing and enhancing the communities around you, this is what gives you a following and brand loyalty.

Orignal From: Brand Management – Branding Yourself–
Posted By Creeva Murkado to Journey To Get Paid at 1/23/2008 10:27:00 AM

Late to the Lifestream Party?

Never – it’s still to early to be late.

It seems my article on life caching struck a chord with someone. I’m glad someone at least shares my understanding on this need. He is just starting to search and find his lifestreaming needs and tools, and this really is the best time to start.

I left him this comment on his site (though his comment system mangled my formatting and I’ve fixed it here):

I’m glad you enjoyed my article – I have a few follow-ups to that article that I need to pound out – such as different ways of actually caching the data. I can say reading a couple of your earlier that you are not late to the life streaming party.

While I agree life streaming is useful, important, and mostly neat. Life caching is the evolutionary transition that will need to occur as the data portability movement takes place. Tools unfortunately to do any type of life caching are terrible at this time. I have some wordpress plugins that I ‘m cutting my PHP learning teeth on that have lots of bugs that I need to streamline – if the object of most of these plugins came from the lifestreaming design instead of spam blog design (repurposing RSS feeds can go both ways) then this small faction of belief in saving our own data can grow.

Dang – sometimes I’m just too long winded.

P.S. Lifestreaming is becoming a verb maybe in a few more years it will be up there with w00t and in the dictionary.

On another one of his posts I left this comment:

I’ll give you the fact that your earlier thoughts on life streaming is correct – it is too much information.

That being said – you need to look at who this is for. Most people don’t care about everything I do and I’ve pruned my RSS feeds that I give to the public down so they only get the useful information.

I archive and save this data for myself – and like the pictures people take of their children growing up, there is never a thing as too much information.

It may be too much information at this point in time – but when personal data mining takes place in a few years as the next hot trend – and archive of this data will be very useful to find trends of different points of your life that you may otherwise forget (or wished you would have forgotten but google reminds everyone anyways).

Over at the lifestream blog the author linked to this original article from here – but while sees usefulness in life caching still believes in the importance of life streaming.   I don’t think you can truly do one without the other, but with this newer concept catching on there is no good way to do it yet.  I left him this comment:

 We can agree to disagree on the importance of life caching – but without accurate and long term archiving of data (life caching) – the lifestream setups most people currently will only be fleeting since most use RSS feeds in a transitional phase of their life stream.  As the RSS feed items expire they are removed from the lifestream.   Even sites like dandelife.com that does the best job of storing data for a lifestream only keeps transitional data from the auxiliary streams and eventually it expires.

I really hope the industry catches up with this idea – I’ll get at least one more of those promised life caching articles out this week.

Life Caching is better then Life Streams

Life Caching:

Life caching is setting up sites that you have complete control over to save data from sites that you only have varied levels of control. Getting all of your meta data in one place. Saving each detail of data in it’s place so it’s saved, used, and recyclable. Life caching is the next stage as the Data Portability Group moves forward. This is not the goal of the Data Portability Group – it is just what their goal enable you to do. The work however is burdened on to you and I can say there is no easy way to do this and some data leakage and loss will always slip through cracks, at least in this stage of the game.

Isn’t this what Life Streaming Accomplishes? How is Life Caching different?

Life Streaming is the step before life caching. While the concepts share alot of overlapping the simplest scenario is that a life stream is a picture in time that does not save your data. A life stream is ephemeral and actual current implementations are very fragile. I have a life stream here. RSS feeds expire so data is lost, companies go out of business so the links it points to is gone, or data just gets missed. But to truly get a better picture of life streaming here is what the life streaming blog says about it:

What is a Lifestream? In it’s simplest form it’s a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline. It is only limited by the content and sources that you use to define it. Mine is available here. Most people that create them choose a few sources based on sites that track our activities such as Del.icio.us (bookmarking), Last.fm (Music we listen to), Flickr (photos we take) etc…Then you can either find software to host your own, or find sites that provide a platform for you.

Many people have been writing about Lifestreams and the potential value they offer for ourselves and others. Some of those people are Jeff Croft, Jeremy Keith, and Emily Chang. It appears to be a concept that is gaining quite a bit of steam.

I was inspired to create a blog for the Lifestream concept after doing a little research which I wrote about on my blog. Most of the information I found was pretty scattered and there wasn’t a central repository of resources so I thought I should create one. I feel that beyond the self expression of allowing people to track their actions in a passive manner there will be many more exciting technologies that will surface from the backend data aggregation that can occur from people supplying this information.

The rub is that 99% of life streams only save the links of the RSS feeds and do not save the actual data. This is inefficient in design because like I said before data get’s lost for various reasons. Life caching however has the prime goal of saving that individual data for your use and your manipulation. This gives you freedom to do with what you want. Take your data anywhere and everywhere, do with it what you will.

How is this different from the Data Portability Group?

In some aspects, like the concepts of life streaming, life caching shares a few steps in common with the Data Portability Group. What the Data Portability Group means to give is methods and standards that give you tools to do with your data what you will. However, this doesn’t actually mean you will do anything with it or that there will be a standard out of the box configuration for you. The responsibility is on you to act and use these tools that will hopefully emerge.

The Data Portability Group is key for this going forward and allowing you to withdraw your data from the sites that were previously walled gardens. After the garden gates are finally thrown open you have the freedom to do with the data what you will. Please put this power to good use.

Why Do I care?

You should care because this is about you. It is who you are. It does not specifically define you in any ways and most people would understand that it’s a complete picture of you. There are however aspects of you that you may want to share at a later date. The stories your grandmother told you will get fuzzier over time. Hopefully the idea of life caching which is still in it’s infancy will lead to life story archives that the generations after us can learn from. Our grandkids will be able ot mine the data and read the stories you want to pass on.

Will those after you care that you listened to Fallout Boy on June 7th, 2008? Maybe not, but maybe your grandkids will discover similar music tastes with you. It will give them an understanding of who you are. It will also give them ways to identify with you in a way that you could never identify with the pilgrims that came across on the mayflower.

What do I save?

The ideal answer is everything. I would say between the RSS streams I save and the email I collect I am almost up to a 90% efficiency of collecting my personal data online.

To give you an example:

This may seem like a lot of data. It is, but it’s also what we deal with in a normal consuming internet fashion. I don’t use the tools that save which applications I’m running and I’m looking for something like last.fm for movies so it’s more automatic – but that will come in time.

Via e-mail I save my phone calls, my bills, banking history- all this can be stored offline and databased in the home. Your own personal Google for yourself should be the end goal of life caching.

Doesn’t this make it easier for companies to mine data about me?

Yes the google monster is omnipotent. Anything you share online can be snagged up and archived away by google. Is this a good thing? Maybe or maybe not. There is no reason you would need to make most of this data public. You could set up to store this data in email archives, private data sites, or personal home encrypted databases. Life caching is not about displaying your life. It’s about having control over it and saving it for a future date.

As the Data Portability Group expands they hope to implement permission controls for the data. This will help prevent against data mining to some extent. The only true answer is that if there are things that you don’t want anyone to know about do not place them anywhere that is publicly accessible or in the hands of any company or person other then yourself.

How do I store and backup the data?

There are many ways. I use WordPress with a variety of plugins to maintain all my data on the site. I also use quite a bit of feedburner kung-fu and gmail filters. The key thing is that I can extract this data into other formats from just those two methods. I could dump it into a personal database or wiki. The tools are only at the beginning of stages to make this useful for you. It is easier to back it up before you lose it then to want it after it is gone.

What Can’t I backup?

In an ideal world there is nothing that you can’t backup. We don’t however live in an ideal world. Mostly the limitations deal with which sites give you some form of access to your data. Some don’t allow you to take friend’s list with you. Other sites don’t allow you to get posts out unless you implement site scraping which could break the terms of service you agreed to.

The limitation is in the tools and the agreements and the Data Portability Group is helping lead the future in developments that will allow you greater access to your own data.

How do you share with your friends?

Beyond having a public blog which your friends may or may not visit there are multiple ways. I have two major RSS feeds coming out my website. The public RSS feed gives everyone a filtered feed of my posts. This way they don’t get spammed with every song I listen to on last.fm or every single story I digg when it happens. This RSS feed then goes and notifies my twitter friends that I’ve posted something new that I find relevant. It also goes out and feeds the stories to tumblr, jaiku, and facebook. It is also the feed that my RSS readers get.

The secondary feed goes to feedburner and gives me a post to email option. This allows me to save via an email archive all of my daily posts so they are searchable through gmail for myself. Users could subscribe to this feed if they asked me, it’s just the amount of data can sometimes be overwhelming and I’ve had a few complaints from a couple of twitter friends.

From my wordpress blog I post to other blog sites. For example when I finish and publish this post it will also be posted at my msn spaces accounts, my old blog at blogspot, vox, xanga, myspace, livejournal, and dandelife. So no matter where you have friended me you can get notifications that I’ve published and posted something.

Finally in some of the message boards I use my signature contains a java script that rotates my 5 newest stories so people can read the headlines and click if they find it interesting.

Do you truly think that this is the future?

Yes, your data is you and part of you is also your data. Hopefully the stories we wish to pass down can be archived, saved, and cached for all to read and consume for generations to come.

Final Notes:

I hope this explanation is relevant for you and that you have interesting in preserving your own data. Each of the links in this article will help you with different aspects of your design. If you have further questions or need some details expanded please leave a comment or contact me so we can hash out ideas and clarify them.

For those heavily interested I would recommend posting and devising ways that you can cache your online and offline life. Work with the Data Portability Group on tools to make this work. The most important thing is to only deal with companies that allow you to do with your data what you want and place it where you need it. Thank and support the companies that do.

How the new Creeva.com works – Part 1 The Visual Look and Layout

Ok so I’m finally happy enough with the migration that I moved all the DNS settings over to my new web host and turned the old creeva.com back to creeva.blogspot.com.   As they say, breaking up is hard to do.   Hard for me since I had some functionality in the old blog that I was missing (until earlier today) in the new blog.

First of all, obviously I have moved to a sparser design.   I like zen-like simplicity.   No distractions and the meat in front of you on the plate.  Part of this reason is that moving from the blogger platform to the wordpress platform I couldn’tuse the same themes and I was being lazy when it came to the idea of converting the theme.   After being distraught and having issues over this fact I then decided I would make a new layout.  After coming to this conclusion I became happier and more excited about the new layout.   There are some more things to do but that will come with time.

The basic design things you will see is less widgets on the front page (and no advertising currently) I moved some of the functionality off to sub pages (something blogger didn’t support).

My subpages are across the top they are:

Random Quotes    -  These are things I’ve collected over time (this page may not make the grade long term)

About Me   -  A Random Self Observation
Security – Some of the Security I’ve enjoyed that I wrote myself

Music – Not finished – but is going to old information about the bands I play in

Photos – My photo album (sourced at flickr)

Videos – Videos I’ve made or uploaded – or just videos I like

Contact Me – My contact information

Links – Links to friends/

It’s late and I’ll get to writing up part 2 of how the new creeva.com works tomorrow.  The next part of this mini-series is which wordpress plug-ins I am using.

Google Mobile Phone OS – Android

Google has announced their new mobile phone platform named android. From Ars Technica:

The Google Phone has arrived, sort of, but not in the long-rumored embodiment that many had expected. Google announced this morning that it has developed a new mobile OS called “Android“—a result of its acquisition of a mobile software company of the same name in 2005—that will allow the company to get Google’s mobile apps into as many hands as possible starting in mid-2008. Android is Linux-based and open source, and and aspects of the platform will be made available to handset manufacturers for free under the Apache license.

Google’s handset partners upon launch will include Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and LG, confirming many of the recent rumors that Google would not be developing the hardware on its own. Google has a number of carrier partners worldwide as well, such as T-Mobile and Sprint in the US, T-Mobile/Deutsche Telekom in Europe, and China Mobile in China, to name a few. The whole thing comes as part of the Open Handset Alliance—also announced by Google today.

Google has chosen to launch Android in this way is because it wanted to put its focus on the platform for development of its mobile applications. Although Java is widely available on many handsets worldwide, it still operates differently from phone to phone and can’t provide the type of flexibility that Google wants for itself and its partners. In addition to rolling out its own suite of mobile apps, Google also plans to make a “full” SDK for Android available next week, making the platform even more attractive to third-party developers (and perhaps delivering a slight ice burn to Apple on the side). And the more third-party apps there are available for the platform, the more attractive it will be for customers.

“This partnership will help unleash the potential of mobile technology for billions of users around the world. A fresh approach to fostering innovation in the mobile industry will help shape a new computing environment that will change the way people access and share information in the future,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a statement. “Today’s announcement is more ambitious than any single ‘Google Phone’ that the press has been speculating about over the past few weeks. Our vision is that the powerful platform we’re unveiling will power thousands of different phone models.”

Here is the video introduction:

Hopefully this will be the mobile phone OS to take everyone forward – and let’s hope there isn’t an immediate price drop.

Can you have too many profiles?

I ran across this article and it posed an interesting question:

Can you have too many profiles?

“…..How many people have social networking profiles with multiple services? MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and others? Can someone have too many? And of course, can it hurt their career potential to have one? This topic has been covered by many, but I revisit it because it speaks to the idea of self-reporting versus objective data determining career potential…..”

More detail from the author is available from the site – but here is the comment I left and my view on it.

Yes you can have too many profiles – but it matters how you manage and maintain them.

For example –

I use linkedin for business contacts.

I use myspace for online and offline friends – I have to know them BEFORE I add them to my friends list.

I use facebook for family and friends that I’m willing to get a bit more personal with.

I also use about 30 other sites – and yes these can effect your online reputation – if you go to my blog www.creeva.com you’ll see on the left hand side all the major networks I am a member of using my lijit widget to consolidate them all.

Having them all consolidated and searchable makes me much more aware of what I post since I know i have to accountable for everything.

I don’t normally include profiles for sites where I tried the service and stopped using it since there will be very minimal application.

It’s not a question in some ways of how many public online profiles you have as much as it is are you aware what is happening to the data.

Since I dump all the data into my blog it makes it kind of easy for a potential employer to read up about me. I am aware of that – I’m also comfortable enough that I realize if someone doesn’t want me for a job because of one or more of my personal beliefs – then I didn’t want to work for them anyways.

Sometimes I get personal on my blog and sometimes I get techinical. It’s a matter of what I’m writing and I’m not too worried about the audience since I’m here to share information not hide it away.

I’m one of those rare people that while i believe in personal privacy I think I have alot to share and having it in my public profiles means that my friends, family, co-workers, and potential employers can be aware of it and discuss it ahead of time before it becomes an issue – or they can decide it’s a non-issue.

I realize that I’m not the most eloquent all the time. I also realize that some of my readers would prefer I stuck on topic. These are just the things that run and scamper through my mind.

Plaxo – The Return

Earlier this week I had posted complaints about Plaxo (here). I do have to say Plaxo has won me back over. A director at Plaxo had seen my post and contacted me directly about it. I submitted screenshots and gave them a brief overview what was happening in the 5 minutes I could spare between meetings.

After a day they got back to me. The problem seems to be in the fact that there interface saves your view. Compounded on this it was save to search mode – which in turn had no hits – hence it seemed blank. There really is no way to know this what being much more intimately involved with the web site then I obviously was. They admitted it sucked. I gave them the hard suggestion to not save a search mode view – or at least save the search term in the text serach box to make it seem more obvious.

I can say contacting me directly was miles beyond what I would have expected – since for example I was brushed off contacting Digg directly about a problem with blogger beta – Digg had told me they would support blogger when it was out of beta. A few months after the fact and many emails by me did they actually do that.

I admit my part was wrong in not initiating a conversation with Plaxo directly myself – but I can say they have gone above and beyond anything I would have expected.

Open Social Web

Open Social Web

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

  • Ownership of their own personal information, including:
    • their own profile data
    • the list of people they are connected to
    • the activity stream of content they create;
  • Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
  • Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

  • Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
  • Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
  • Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
  • Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

If only more people got onto the bandwagon – social network integration would be a true reality

Problems with Plaxo

I’ve done a few posts saying the virtues of Plaxo. I will first admit I have not checked the forums, but I have checked their blog. So this is irritating for a company that I’ve placed accolades on top of in my continuing quest to sync and simplify my life.

The issue I am having is all of my contacts of disappeared. I first noticed this on thursday lat week and I let it go considering it was a temporary glitch or my browser didn’t render the page properly. My calender was still working so I was happy at the time.

I logged in today though and my calender was still working, but still no contacts. No contacts means their new “social network” called Pulse is completely useless also. Now normally this wouldn’t be a big deal to me since I’ve dealt with other minor issues with Plaxo in the past. But I had to re authenticate yahoo today in my account and then I hoped my contacts would re populate – they did not. So theoretically all contacts population (the pudding in the Plaxo pie) is now broken for my account.

The other sync points I use – outlook, google, yahoo, msn, and aim are all up to date with each other. So my data may not be centralized but it is up to date. I’ll give them another week or so to decide if this “hub” is worth using if I can’t get to it for my central need. This issue is highly annoying but not devastating in my life as a whole since I still have the information. This may however make me rethink giving Plaxo the second chance I did give it.

Feed/Post Consolidation

The feed that was auto posting my tumblr site, now has my del.icio.us and digg posts embedded in it. The good thing is that there now will be less random autoposts (3 down to 1) and less overall clutter. I’m hoping this works out or I will go back to the old method.