[PP-main] Perspective from a "writer"

[Matt Michie]

I'd like to think that I am what Joakim Ziegler refers to as a "young, up
and coming writer".  I currently volunteer for Linux.com and write 
weekly featured articles.

I'm darn keen on most of the ideas bubbling around the idea of Peer Press.  
I'm not completely convinced on the idea of having a centralized system,
but one of the things I like about the idea is that when an article of
mine gets syndicated I could log into peerpress.org and get a detailed
report on where my articles are being published, where the discussions are
taking place, and perhaps how many times they have been viewed.  It would
be nice to go into an interview being able to say, "my 22 articles have
been published on 33 independent web sites in 10 countries and have been
viewed over 100,000 times by 75,000 people".

Right now, I'm doing some manual tracking at:

http://web.nmsu.edu/~mmichie/writings.html 

Often though, I miss web-logs that have linked to my articles, because I
don't even know they exist.  It's also a pain to manually update it, I've
written quite a few more articles than are linked there.  In fact,
Linux Today is tracking them better than I am at the moment:

http://linuxtoday.com/cgi-bin/byauthor.cgi?author=Matt:Michie 

Another idea I like, is syndicating comments.  Links to my articles
sometimes get posted from Linux Today, Daemon Daily News, Slashdot,
Freshmeat, et al.  Each with their own independent and sometimes redundant
discussion.  It would be nice to be able to read and respond to one
coherent message thread.

I'd also like to say that since I already don't get paid for writing, a
distribution system such as this doesn't bother me much.  If my writing
strikes a chord in an audience, it gets published and I'm happy.  If I
establish an audience, I'll be in a great position to publish a dead-tree
book later on down the road if I need/want to.  

I guess that's it for now, I'll have to stew awhile on some of the other
issues.

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Matt Michie - mmichie at linux.com - http://web.nmsu.edu/~mmichie
The more you know, the less you understand.