Metroblogging and Miss604
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When writing about strictly-Vancouver content I often have to chose between publishing on my own site or on Metroblogging. I have been involved with Metroblogging Vancouver for over a year and am actually one of the City Captains – meaning I get to sit in on all the global blogging domination chats every month, which is kinda fun. If you’re missing some content, think I haven’t updated or posted about a certain topic it may be useful to get your Rebecca fix over at Metblogs. For instance, I’ve had a few people ask me about Google Transit and why I haven’t written anything about it – rest-assured I have, it’s just over there.
My fave/top posts on Metblogs include:
Why share my content with another site? I don’t know, I usually find myself asking that same question and wondering why I’m contributing, free of charge, to a site that makes money that I don’t see. I think I just like the idea of contributing, period. Getting different perspectives, different audiences etc. Am I a sucker then? Maybe, but it’s still pretty fun to be a part of such a neat group of authors, locally and from around the world. BTW – we’re almost always looking for more authors so if you’re interested just drop me a line.
11 Comments — Comments Are Closed
Any reason you don’t cross post your own postings? That would seem to meet both goals — of sharing stuff on metblogs and also keeping your own content here.
I often cross post between my personal site and my work site. Usually, I’ll do the “main post” on one or the other and then intro / excerpt it and link over to the other one, but sometimes, especially for longer pieces, I’ll do a full post at both locations.
Again, I’d love more systems where I could just shoot my content to different categorizations in different places. There are no easy answers.
We’re not really “allowed” to cross-post. It’s supposed to be unique content although I do manage to sneak in a link back to my posts here since I’ve already covered the topic in some shape or form, at some point anyway… but still….
Aargh. I hate those kind of stupid rules. Which is exactly why I’ve never gotten involved in any of those things.
apparently there was a Google Transit demo in Harbour Center…? and all of us on the third floor were like “is there anything free?” and no one knew, so we all stayed up there in our windowless computer lab doing our professor’s biddings, left to wonder, in a slightly dismissive way, if there was ever a new sticker that got away…
actually, then i ran into my friend karen i havent seen in forever on the 135 out to burnaby campus and she had a Google Transit toque and i silently cursed the fact that none of us had wanted to take a break to go look.
Yeah they had the big unveiling yesterday – I think Richard went
They should really do some food-like-that (a Boris invention) google adsense thing, where each author can add their google adsense key to their account. For all of that author’s posts, that adsense key should be used to create the ads for it. That would be a fairer system.
I hope that doesn’t make you a sucker because then it makes the rest of us suckers as well. You aren’t the only one doing for the love of building things, that’s pretty much the sole motivator for all of us. As you know what ever cash comes in, that isn’t put back into the sites themselves we spread around to the cities every month and we’re working very hard to be able to regularly give something back to the captains for all of their hard work. You know this all ready, we’re starting with a few and trying to grow from there. The majority of my day these days is spent trying to figure exactly that out. It’s mine, and everyones desire to be a part of and help build something cool that keeps this going day after day. You know we love you, right? Right??
And Boris, if it was just some stupid rule we’d lose it in a moment, but it’s something we’ve come to after seeing the effects of both. The whole point of metblogs sites is that it’s a community collaboration – each author puts something in in both the form of content and readers who go to the site for that persons stuff, the collection of which has created some really outstanding online communities. The authors benefit from this as well in that all the readers from the other authors on the site get to check out their stuff and follow links back to their site if they so choose. Crossposting is counter to that effort, in that it puts in content, but not the readers (as they have no reason to go to the site if they are reading it elsewhere) meaning that author is only taking the other authors readers, not contributing any of their own. Also multiple comment threads on the same post gets painful quick. In the 4+ years we’ve been doing metblogs, we’ve tried all kinds of things and this is the evolution of trial and error, and what works best for the community as a whole. It’s not just some mindless dumb rule we made up for no reason. We really do try and give the authors as much freedom and exposure as we can. Running this thing isn’t easy by any means, but I love it and really do think it’s worth while in the end.
@Sean: I can understand that a full-article cross-post would certainly defeat the purpose of gathering all this great location-based content in one place, but does the rule prohibit these types of posts: “I just wrote up a great post over on MetBlogs about Google Transit. [short blockquoted excerpt]. Go check out the whole article.”
@Miss604: I often forget that you even write for MetBlogs… hehe… Posts like these make me go read a few articles. 😉
I did indeed attend, and I have a report stuck in my brain. I’ll try to dislodge it this weekend.
Oh my … a friend of mine at Google in Mountain View will be thrilled …
@Keith, not at all and in fact that is totally encouraged. We even have widgets that authors can use, if they want, that will show their recent posts from metblogs on their own blog.