All Things Cahill

The Blogs as Aggregator

Over the past two years, we’ve seen the genie come out of the bag on blogging.  In the good old days if you wanted our content, you came to our blog.  Now, our content is being automatically posted in a bunch of spots, perhaps on Facebook, Google Buzz, Google Reader, and even the headline shows up on Twitter.

Then we throw our participation on those other sites in, and now we’re all over the place.  It’s hard for us to keep up with everything we’re doing, but our readers are at best getting an incomplete picture.

So I pose this question: should not our blog be the place where all of our participation is aggregated? Maybe this site indeed should be “All Things Cahill” as the name implies.

There are several problems:

• We need to filter for unique content.  The recent Google Buzz launch has shown that cross posting between services can lead to some truly weird looping problems.  Multiple copies of the same post start to show up as Buzz posts to Twitter and Twitter sends to Buzz.  Honestly, I’m surprised some of you haven’t unraveled the fabric of the universe…
• What about the unique flavor of those services?  Personally, I like the distinct difference between my Twitter posse, the Facebook crowd and my audience here.  They’re all different communities and the idea of tying them all together here might be somehow denigrate that.  For the record, Facebook tends to be my long time friends, the folks I have physically met, whereas Twitter is a more general distribution.
• Does removing the message from the service remove it from it’s context?  Quite probably, esp. in the situation that my comment is part of the ongoing discussion.

So I ask the question: does it make sense attempt to pull in as much as possible from around the web?  Obviously twitter is here, how about Google Buzz, Foursquare, Yelp, etc.?

Deep down suspect we’d find overall the non-blog content is generally of much lower value.  Share your thoughts…