But the medium is the message, and creating one info entry for multiple Web platforms will always incorporate a bit of failure.

It’s efficient, but there’s no getting around the fact that, for example, a good Tweet is not a good blog entry.

But what makes a good Buzz? Well, Google’s service can accommodate just about anything with its “expand this post” option. It seemingly has no constraints. Great, right?

Maybe not.

Buzz’s flexibility is one reason why it failed to take off to the extent of Twitter.

No constraints on Buzz’s ability to incorporate content means Buzz has no constant and clear promise about what kind of information experience you are going to have when you interact with it.

On the Web, metadata about your content — clear indications of what it is about, how long it might take to consume it, what payoff there might be, why it matters — are just as important as the content itself. The Web is a grazing medium with an effectively infinite number of alternatives at all times for people browsing your content. If people want to leave, it’s very likely they will.

On Buzz you could get two words, or videos, or 500 words and a pic, or just a link, or whatever strikes a sharer’s fancy. It’s complicated. You don’t know how long a Buzz will take. Your time is vulnerable.

Compare that to Twitter’s promise: No more than 140 characters.

So simple. Even if the topical focus of the content varies, the information will remain digestible because of its limited length. Your time is protected.

Time is our most precious commodity. Attention, too. Services that enhance our ability to use them effectively will win the day, even at the cost of sacrificing flexibility of information experience.

What I’m doing by updating my entire network with one post of a style best accommodated by my blog is compromising the promise made by different Web services. I bring a cold business-like approach to Facebook and its strength in adding virtuality to real-world relationships; I avoid the clear brevity required by Twitter; with Buzz, I … well, Buzz has no promise.

Will this be worth it? Don’t know. But if you’re a company with money to spare, I suggest customizing your communication to each Web service.

Until I get those deep pockets, I’ll experiment with feeding my chain of interconnected sites (Twitter, Buzz, Facebook Fan Page, Google Shared Items) with this blog. I have a feeling it won’t last.

Summary: By sharing items in Google Reader, you can publish to your blog and four other outlets, in this order, with one action:

1. Shared Items in Google Reader
2. Buzz
3. Twitter
4. Your blog
5. Facebook

You will need:

1. An independently hosted blog running on WordPress.
2. Of course: Twitter, Facebook and a Google account (with Buzz activated).
3. Wordbook addon for WordPress.
4. Twitter Tools addon for WordPress
5. Advanced Category Excluder addon for WordPress (this is optional, but I use it to avoid cluttering my blog’s home page with poorly formatted blog posts).
6. Recommended Reading addon for WordPress.
7. BuzzCanTweet connected to your Twitter account.

Steps:

1. Set up your Google, Twitter and Facebook accounts.
2. Create a “Shared Items” category for your blog.
3. Activate and set up the Recommended Reading addon.
4. Set up a “Shared Items” static page on your blog. Add the Recommended Reading shortcode of (leftbracket)recreading(rightbracket) (with brackets around it, as indicated). This will cause this page to pull in a list of your shared items on Google Reader.
5. In your Google Buzz settings, make sure the connected sites include Twitter and Google Reader.
6. In the settings tab and Goodies sub tab of your Google Reader page, grab the bookmarklet and drag it into your bookmarks bar. This allows you to easily share any Web page in Google Reader. This is optional, but useful when surfing.
7. For Twitter/Buzz integration to work properly, you need to make your Google profile into a username URL. To do this, go to your profile editing page, and scroll down to the “Profile URL” section. Follow the instructions there. Warning: This can cause your Gmail address to become publicly available. If this is a concern, go ahead (after connecting to BuzzCanTweet) and change it back to a numerical profile URL after you have completed the integration of Buzz Can Tweet with your Twitter account. I don’t know if a username URL’s brief existence will cause privacy problems later. I suppose that’s a risk you’ll have to take.
8. Go ahead and connect your Buzz account to your Twitter account by going to BuzzCanTweet and clicking Get Started.
9. Set up Wordbook in your WordPress blog to publish posts to your wall.
10. Set up Twitter Tools in your WordPress blog. Important: You must enable “Create a blog post from each of your Tweets.” Assign the “Shared Items” category to these tweets by choosing it from the dropdown to the right of “category for tweet posts.” The rest of the options are optional and unrelated to the topic of this post.
11. Set up the Automatic Category Excluder, if you want, to exclude the “Shared Items” category from your home page. I do this because, unfortunately, blog posts created from tweets look horrific. The headlines are cut off, the summaries are truncated…but the link is there, and so is, if you write succinctly, the gist.
12. Important to remember: Your tweets will run entirely off, I think, the notes field in Google Reader, if you fill it in. (If you don’t, it grabs headline, then notes. I posted pictures at bottom of this post of a shared item format, and the result in different outlets.) And your auto-made blog posts run off your tweets. And your Facebook updates run off your auto-generated blog posts.  Result: What you write in the Google Reader summary field is absolutely key to how it appears on Twitter AND your blog AND Facebook. In Buzz and Reader, the shared items appear as you would expect when sharing from Reader. This is why I set aside my Shared Items to a specific page.
13. Start sharing using Google Reader.

So this is the big-picture view of what happens:

1. Share something using Google Reader (either in Google Reader itself, or by using the bookmarklet).
2. That item gets sent to Buzz.
3. Buzz, via BuzzCanTweet, sends the item to Twitter. It pulls info from the notes field for headline and summary, and the link provided goes back to your individual buzz post.
4. The tweet then gets sent to your blog as a blog post, published in the “shared items” category,  using Twitter Tools.
5. Wordbook then publishes that blog post to your Facebook wall.

Warnings:

1. A Buzz/Twitter bug causes your buzzes to be generated twice from your tweets. Happens once per day. Just watch out for it. Seems to occur late at night.
2. The blog posts (and thus, Facebook posts)  and, to some extent, tweets, made from this method look bad.
3. The links in your tweets go back to the buzz individual page, not your blog post.

I somewhat prefer just running everything through my blog and leaving Reader out of it, but sharing is so fast and efficient this way. See the pictures after “read more” to see how the shared item looks in various outlets.

Related post: 5 steps to get your blog entries on Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz all at once, using only your WordPress blog

Pictures of how a shared item appears after the link.

This is how I formatted the post in Google Reader.

This is how the shared item appears as a blog entry.

This is how the shared item appears on Facebook.

This is how the shared item looks on Twitter.

This is how the shared item appears on the recommended reading page.

1) You’ll need WordPress running your blog; this method won’t work unless you host your own.

2) To send posts to your Facebook account, you’ll need Wordbook.

3) To send posts to your Twitter account, you’ll need Status Updater. (I think I had problems using this with Facebook, thus the usage of Wordbook, even though Status Updater has a Facebook option.)

4) Sending posts to Google Buzz is a bit of a hack. Before you proceed, note that this works well only if you do not initially post using Google Buzz. Everything must run through your blog.

4a) First, you will need to connect your Buzz account to your Twitter account, which can be done after clicking on your Buzz link in Gmail, then clicking on “Connected Sites.” Fill in the necessary info and save.

4b) For this work properly, you need to make your Google profile into a username URL. To do this, go to your profile editing page, and scroll down to the “Profile URL” section. Follow the instructions there. Warning: This can cause your Gmail address to become publicly available. If this is a concern, go ahead and change it back to a numerical profile URL after you have completed the integration of Buzz Can Tweet with your Twitter account. I don’t know if a username URL’s brief existence will cause privacy problems later. I suppose that’s a risk you’ll have to take.

4c) Then you will need to sign up with Buzz Can Tweet. What this Web service normally does is send your Buzz entries to Twitter, but it has a bug in it that will eventually post Twitter entries received from Buzz back to Buzz, thus doubling your entries on Buzz — if you were posting initially through Buzz. But with my method, you post only through your blog, so it avoids this bug.

4d) Go to your Twitter account “Connections” (in Settings) and make sure Buzz Can Tweet is allowed to connect to your Twitter profile.

4e) Remember, if you don’t want your Gmail address to be publicly discoverable, don’t forget to change your profile URL back to a numerical value on your profile editing page.

5) Start your mad gathering and sharing of Web treasures and ponderous thoughts.

To recap  how this works:

1. I post an entry on my blog (often using QuickPost).
2. That entry gets posted on Facebook with Wordbook, and on Twitter with Status Updater.
3. Then Buzz Can Tweet sends the Twitter update to my Buzz account.
4. Voilà: Four networks updated in one step.

Of course, there is something to be said for being selective about how and how often you update each service. This method unfortunately does not gracefully account for that, so beware the adjective “spammy” being attached to your online activities. There also may be some significant lag time between a post showing up on your Twitter account and showing up in your Buzz feed. Finally, Buzz Can Tweet or Google may modify their services to eliminate the Buzz Can Tweet bug that enables this to work. Well, you know, chaos reigns.

Any information on the quality of the question, or is beauty always in the eye of the beholder?

1. Every piece of content should function as an independent business that can be embedded in whatever Web site wishes to host it;
2. Advertising needs to integrate with every piece of content and go wherever it goes;
3. Journalism organizations should think of themselves as wire services providing content for any interested Web site; let people who intimately know their audience aggregate and present the content (after finding it with search);
4. Geographic areas are losing a means by which to form a common identity;
5. Human connections are being driven by shared interests, not proximity, but relationships without a physical component lack accountability;
6. A journalism organization’s value will be measured by, for example, “content views” or “time spent on content” instead of page views or time spent on page.