Publishing in the Cloulds

One of the ideas I’ve been toying with since last fall is cloud publishing.  The idea in a nutshell: all the content you add to the web becomes your publishing catalogue.  While a blog(s) is a likely homebase for such activity, the efforts we apply in commenting on the blogs of others, micro-blogging, posting photos and videos, heck, even sharing  play lists…all this activity now becomes the body of ones work regardless of where it’s occurring.

My idea has run into some challenges along the way.  When Twitter messed with their search limiting it’s capability last winter, it seemed a lot of content fell off the cloud.  One of the important underpinnings of this concept is that through search all of your content will remain publicly accessible indefinitely. But over the last few months I’ve come to realize how friendfeed really captures the reality of cloud publishing and keeps all the content in play.  This includes the search of the twitter stream that twitter search no longer keeps accessible.  Friendfeed allows you to capture any and/or all of your stuff into one stream becoming the de facto catalogue of your cloud publishing efforts.

This post isn’t really about the tools though, it’s about the practice.  I want to share an example of cloud publishing that’s occurring on this blog, but not authored by me.  As I look through the many comments readers have left here, one name continues to reappear with a type of comment that goes beyond commenting convention.  He’s clearly a positive deviant (a label I think he might enjoy).  So I invite you to take a stroll through the comments of Matt Searles and notice how his body of work has emerged on this cloud.  It’s rich stuff, full of insight and speculation.  It deserves to be brought out into the light and shared.  The easiest way is I know is to send you over to Matt’s comment stream on Backtype and have a look.  Then notice how this content is different from the main thrust of his blog.  It’s as though a separate and distinct “book” is emerging.

(Thanks to Jeb, whose fine comment yesterday over in the Garage reminded me of Matt’s efforts.)