For those who don’t know — the Carnival of Journalism is something I restarted in January (coming up on a year!) where a bunch of journalism-bloggers get together and write about the same topic once a month. The question is posed by the host — who rotates.
This month’s host is the Guardian’s developer blog, and they ask:
If you are a journalist, what would be the best present from programmers and developers that Santa Claus could leave under your Christmas tree? And, correspondingly, if you are a programmer or developer, what would be the best present from journalism that Father Christmas could deliver down your chimney?
If I had to answer the question succinctly: I want a frictionless blogging platform. Not Tumblr or Posterous (although they’ve done an awesome job). I think there is a way to make something even simpler — a platform where I can save something to Delicious and create the formatting once so that from henceforth all Delicious links will be posted on my blog the way I want. (ITTF does an OK job, but it’s not perfect).
I go through various phases with my personal blog. When I first started in 2005, it was called “Adventures in Freelancing,” and it was about just that — the various stories I was working on or published or other stories I was reading and found interesting.
Since Spot.Us started, my blogging has laxed (at best). I use it for occasional big thoughts or announcements. Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Google+, etc., take up a much larger space of my “online productivity” and to be honest — I wish there were ways to streamline my efforts.
Of course, there is IFTT.com — which is what I’m using to repost this Google+ update to my personal blog. And from my blog, it will then automatically be tweeted. So that’s a start.
But there are things lost in the translation from Google+ to my personal blog and back out to Twitter.
In a strange way, I still think what I’m looking for is FriendFeed. What a brilliant site that was. Too bad they were bought (talent-scouted) by Facebook.
So I want a platform where I can post something on Google+, and format it once and forever, and my Google+ public posts will appear on my blog the way I want.
That’s my holiday gift ask.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Steve Rhodes.
A version of this post first appeared here.