In case you hadn’t heard, our local newspaper publishers (Gazette-Times/Democrat Herald owned by Lee Enterprises) have taken a giant step future-ward with the launch of the new mid-valley voice social network. If you are not local, I would hazard a guess that other historically print based publishers are doing a similar thing to try to compensate for dwindling print subscriptions, so this article is not just for locals.
It just would not suit my personal agenda NOT to participate in a local community-based social network, so the first thing I did there was create a blog. However, I don’t really want to maintain yet another blog. Obviously I prefer to funnel the traffic to my own blog that I control. It would be ideal if the community blog would directly source posts via RSS. At first it did not seem to do that, so I created a yourminis RSS widget for Hot Dorkage. This is what it looks like.
Ordinarily you wouldn’t have a widget referring to a blog on the same blog, but this is kind of a meta post about blogging and techniques to drive traffic, so it’s OK–and you won’t go to HELL or get sucked into a vortex if you click it!
After a while I rechecked the community blog and it does seem to be picking up the Hot Dorkage posts after all in a manner of speaking. I guess I wasn’t patient enough. The blogging software at MVV seems to have quite a few features and a very nice editor. However I’m a little disturbed that the auto-sourced articles do not seem to link back at all to their original source, plus there’s nothing you can click to read the full article. Paradoxically, however, if you click the Stumbleupon link it DOES stumble the original article. (Of course nobody in the wild would actually stumble an article that they hadn’t been able to read yet!!) I assume that the digg and technorati links work the same. This also confirms that they *HAVE* the original, since CLEARLY the feed gives it to them. I am going to try to get support from the original developer, since the locals obviously haven’t figured out how to support their userbase yet.
You can check out my new auto-sourced blog on Mid-Valley Voice to see what I am talking about.
Listen to this post 
I guess you are halfway there.
If you actually visit the site, do they allow you to add links manually or do they not want their bloggers linking out?
Well sure, you can manually make blog posts on their site and link to whatever you want, essentially giving away all your work to them. I have a unique blog post over there with the widget on it.
MVV do automatically suck in the teaser whenever you post on your own blog. But it would be better if they followed the model of FoodBuzz — automatically receives each blog post from the original blog and lists it, with links. When someone clicks, they frame the original blog site so it can be seen as the author intended. The MVV site is annoying because it publishes a teaser with no link to the full article. And another sour vibe: I wrote to their support two days ago and have not gotten an answer. I have two friends at the paper, I’m going to go rattle their cages directly.
It definitely doesn’t work giving your work away, as duplicate content issues mean you’re not going to get the credit where it is due. Great way of overcoming this issue, I like it!
I like the look of your widget. Simple and sharp. I just hope, it can also show some shortened version of what’s inside the blogs…? And thank you for providing a link to a new social site.
Yeah, I guess I’m not really giving the work away, cuz MVV only publishes the teaser with NO LINKS. I try to be succinct, but most of my posts are longer than 140 characters, otherwise they’d just be tweets. Automatically sucking in teasers as Hot Dorkage is updated is a *GOOD* thing, because it keeps content fresh for MVV. However the widget will get buried unless I constantly delete and re-add it manually; and other than it, there’s no easy obvious way for MVV readers to click thru to here to read the full articles. The obvious *easy* and fair solution is for *MVV* to make each teaser link to the original blog. That is what most aggregators do — it’s kind of industry standard. However (and this is where networking comes in) I happen to be personal friends with the publisher, so I will bring it up to him next time I see him. There’s nothing like going to the top when you can’t get satisfaction from underlings.
Is MVV a local creation, or is this being mirrored around the nation by papers/publishers?
MVV (Mid Valley Voice) is the domain and site name name of our specific local deployment of some media focused social network software (a la NING). It states it’s powered by theport.com. It’s pretty sophisticated so I’m sure it’s not an ad hoc piece of work just for our little coverage area. It might be something Lee (parent media glom) licensed for all their subsidiaries to use or it might have been licensed locally. Who knows?
Извините, как можно добавить свой материал на сайт?