Cloud Publishing

AziMuth

There’s something coming together in this here head from a variety of influences, and it has to do with realizing the potential for publishing outside the box in the new media.  Much is being made these days about cloud computing.  I offer cloud publishing as way to understand what’s moving the ball forward in social media.  It’s already underway.  Robert Scoble seems to already be well established into the practice of cloud publishing.  His brand and influence easily carry across multiple platforms and he seems quite comfortable to exist outside the blog.  Yet, by integrating all the content through feed services like FriendFeed, none of his readers need miss even a tweet.      

David Meerman Scott stressed in a Chicago presentation this week a similar message he gave to the New Marketing Summit last month: we need to think as publishers.  What’s interesting about this insight is it brings to light that along with authoring, there is power in shared items.  By establishing rss feeds of shared items and bookmarks, you are essentially publishing others, distributing content.  Publishers make content available.  Where as they used to get the stuff in print to get it before the reading eyes, in the new reality: push content into feed.  

Brian Clark shared on twitter today “The Economist “gets” where blogging is at - http://is.gd/6CF0”.  Chris Brogan, in sharing his presentation from Florida today said, “Break media into bites and throw it all over the place.”  Learning the use of blogging tools and making a strong home base, as Mr. Brogan likes to call it, is perhaps the simplist aspect to navigating the new frontiers of social media.  Beyond the home base, Brogan teaches that outposts must be established.  Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, Stumble It, Face Book…the list goes on and on.  FriendFeed can currently gather content from 48 different services and an unlimited(?) amount of rss feeds.  And of course, feedback loops can be established so the FriendFeed stream gets pushed back as it’s own feed into a blog or where ever.    

My sense is that with cloud publishing, authors, influencers and the like can strategically unfurl their message and works, along with shared content and social media interactions in a well executed release across and through many platforms…upon many stages.  In this way the outposts can be seen not so much as lures to drive folks back to the home base, but unique occasions to further the work.  Through a planned orchestration of search and feed, the entirety of the work can get brought together.  Or not, which is the beauty of the medium.  

P.S. I recognize highly monetized blogs will not have all the freedom to explore what i’m advocating here, but the Economist already covered that ground above.  See you in the cloud…