After spending a few hours on setting up the blog and twitter pages and the basic automation between them I decided to rest for a couple of days, to let myself think it over. After all, there's much more than the technical issues at hand, or at least that's what I think ;).
So, there are a few things I've come up with, which I expect to guide the near future development of this research:
First of all, I've decided to start posting some full blog articles instead of just short posts. Twitter is good enough for microblogging as it is and I don't see any reason to run 2 parallel microblogs - Blogger should be used for a wider format, rich with information, media and insight, while Twitter should be used as a front page where headlines are published and through which follower communications are done.
I'm considering posting some song and artist information, along with my listening habits from last.fm using the blog for detailed information and http://twt.fm/ for integration between last.fm and Twitter. I haven't decided about that one yet.
I would like to replace blogger comments with Twitter discussions, using a unique hash tag for each post discussion. I will try to locate an out of the box solution for this. DISQUS maybe?
Beyond that, I'm looking for other interesting tools, especially mashups at the moment, that could add some more juice to this.
Final note, and not less important. I think Twitter should be a catalyst and traffic maker for the blog, and so I will try to invest some energy in crowd building technics. Since this isn't a commercial blog, I can allow myself to experiment freely in this area and I hope this will yield interesting results, which could shed some light on the Twitter crowd building process.
On top of all this, since full articles are going to be posted on Blogger, I will invest some energy in SEO technics, in order to get traffic from Google as well. That way, I expect the blog, along with Twitter to make a complete web publishing solution and feed each other. My past experience with SEO shows that this may be problematic on Google's end, since the sites will actually be cross-linked, but I hope traffic coming from Twitter will payoff and make up for that bad SEO habit.
TODO: Some technical issues that have to be taken care of quickly:
- Post metadata design still breaks in IE browsers.
- Follow me on Twitter button graphic isn't displayed for some reason. Upload to photobucket instead of BlogSpot.
This article hasn't been SEOptimized.
I've enabled "Blogger in draft" on the blog dashboard and made it the default state of my Blogger editing environment, but so far haven't found a way to turn an existing post into a Page Post. Since this is a new page, I hope it could be turned into a Page Post during the publishing process. Let's see if that works...
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