Glipho: The Glue Between Blogging, Content Curation, and Social Media

Who needs another blogging platform?

In truth, I’ve neglected my blogs badly over the past year or two. Everyone I know is hanging out on Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, or Twitter, and the running wall graffiti, eye candy, and conversation appeal to our shared need for instant gratification. Social media exerts its pull on most bloggers, and we are, too often, reduced to the role of content curators and commentators. But in the same way that a steady diet of junk food fails to nourish the body, a steady stream of links and likes fails to satisfy a blogger’s larger sense of purpose. It also fails to satisfy an audience who comes, time and time again, to read a particular blogger’s take on things. And when the blog lays dormant too long, that audience slowly, sadly drifts away – with nary a whimper. At that point, ironically, we must turn back to social media – to throw that soapbox on the virtual street corner, climb up onto it, and hawk our wares. Some say “Marketing is king!” I used to argue that it was content that was king. But really, it’s the reader who is king, and without whom none of this would be worth discussing; it’s a symbiotic relationship between blogging, content curation, social media, and readership that keeps the web vibrant and alive.

It can be tough to create a coherent structure around all this – to tie our blogs, our little bits and bytes, our circles, friends, and flaming hoops together and make sense of it all. That’s what I’ve been craving – sort of a dashboard for my own little corner of the Internet. And that is what I may have found in Glipho.com, earlier this week.

A Blogging Platform

Glipho Desk

Whether you’re new to blogging and wondering how to get started or are already an experienced blogger juggling several different blogs on multiple platforms, Glipho.com has appeal as a place to blog.

For the novice, it’s a free and complete blogging platform. The Desk offers a rich-text editor, and even the experienced blogger will appreciate how easy and intuitive it is to pull in your own images from Glipho, Instagram, Flickr, or Picasa, or to search for and embed videos from YouTube.

For the veteran blogger, it’s very easy to import your posts from WordPress, Blogger, and Tumbler in order to share them with a wider and different audience. There are no templates or widgets or whatchamacallits to fiddle with – nothing to distract you from the business of creating and sharing good stuff, very simply.

Great for Content Curation, Too

Glipho Profile

Glipho is rich with great content, much of it thoughtful, analytical, and personal. It’s interesting to read. The spammers and sploggers haven’t discovered it yet, or are being actively shut down by a very friendly but passionate Team Glipho. Share others’ Gliphs, or share great content from outside Glipho.com with a Gliph of your own. Make sure to write a brief post -  150 words, minimum – to explain why you think it’s worth sharing. People are more likely to follow that than a link buried in a post.

Then share your page.

Fits Nicely with Your Social Media Plan

Glipho Profile

Your profile on Glipho.com is easily connected to all the major social media channels: Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, Flickr, Google+, Picasa, LinkedIn, and Instagram. It plays nice with the other kids on the playground, letting you share great content with all your friends from one easy spot.

Tag your Gliphs with your hashtags and topics; each tag can then be Followed (subscribed to) by other Glipho members.

Bringing Sociable Back

Comment on other Gliphs and Follow other writers – they’ll soon do the same for you, and your audience will grow. The site has a nice mix of members from around the world, and it’s a friendly place.

Notice that in the sidebar, you can catch a glimpse of each writer on their other social media sites – get a glimpse of their Twitter stream, see some of their Pins on Pinterest, and connect with them on the networks they share. None of this “Follow me and I’ll follow you back,” stuff – readers will find plenty of motivation to follow if they’re interested in what you write and share, and it’s exceedingly easy to click those buttons.

Glipho as Glue

By not trying to compete head to head with the big social media sites, Glipho immediately won me over – it just integrates things in a nice, simple space that helps me to remember all those other sites are there and gives me convenient links when I want to hop over to one of them. If I just want to write a quick, simple post, I can do it on the spot. If I want to promote a post from one of my other blogs, I can share it on Glipho to gain it a wider audience. I can share photos and videos easily, and I can meet new, interesting people – many of the talented writers who blog about a huge variety of things – for the love of writing and sharing their thoughts and ideas.

Ready to yell, “Cannonball!” and dive in with both feet? Glipho.com is completely free. Come find Holly Jahangiri on Glipho – and say hello.

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28 Comments

  1. The only idea which made me uncomfortable or say… can’t get out of head is having someone with my content and losing some authority to it. Glipho, Zurker, Tumblr and others. Going back to subdomain level from domain, being uncomfortable to think I don’t own my content (in a way) and missing powerful features of WP – this is all too much for a regular and advanced blogger.

    I won’t recommend this even to newbies if it’s a production blogs. As, you won’t learn a thing until you try. For test blogs, it’s ok.

    Just my two cents.

    1. Any time you publish your content, you license it to someone so that they can legally do what you’ve asked them to do – display it to readers around the world. It would be unfair to ask your ISP to transmit your words to the world, then sue them for doing exactly that.

      Yes, you should definitely READ the licenses – your ISP’s, your web hosting company’s, your blogging platform’s – and decide how much control, over what, you are willing to cede in order to meet your objectives. In most cases (including Glipho, unless they’ve changed the terms drastically) you’re just granting a forever license to store the work on their servers and to display it to their users and to not hold them legally liable if some jerk scrapes their site and illegally publishes your work elsewhere. (You can sue the jerk, you just can’t sue the site you asked to put it out there for you.) All pretty reasonable, given the nature of the Internet and the technology it runs on. If you want to keep, to sell, first rights or electronic rights, then don’t publish – negotiate the sale with a publisher first. You can’t get those back once you’ve given them away, and your work may have less monetary value to a buyer after the fact.

      1. Yeah, I agree with your statement and I have always known all this. My comment was actually not about rights and licensing. Sorry, if it gave that idea. It was more focussed on idea of owning the content and doing nifty things with it. Somehow, many will agree that they like to keep their data and work on their site itself (from view of Server administration, backups, transfers, database changes or tweaking) – this is the power a real blog and server gives.

        Anyway, nice discussing things with you. :-)

        1. Oh! I see what you mean. I think of that as “maintaining control” over the content, since “ownership” of it generally refers to copyright and licensing. (Gets confusing for everyone – this notion that “yes, of course you still own all your stuff, but we claim a perpetual, non-exclusive right to display it, translate it, perform it, distribute it, create derivative works from it…” Pretty soon you realize that in fact, you’ve given away the store, but you can’t cry foul if you want to post it to the Internet, because when you think long and hard about it, you’d claim the same rights just to be safe if you were the ISP!)

          I agree, though, which is why I have a self-hosted WordPress blog. You realize that “control” is illusory if your content is on anyone else’s server and you don’t have backups. ;) If Hostgator went dark tomorrow, could I reconstruct? Yes. If Glipho did? Yes. That’s what we ultimately control.

          But on a day to day basis, I like having control over the .css and the presentation – the ability to readily edit and tweak the look of the whole site to suit me. Posting on other platforms doesn’t keep me from doing that, and in fact can help bring in new readers to my own blog “property” as well as to help create a stronger sense of community that keeps them coming back. (I’ve done a dismal job of that with Glipho, since writing this, but it’s my fault, not theirs! I just got busy and did not maintain any of my sits well for a while.)

          1. @Mrinal – Thanks for sharing your thoughts! Good to see folks commenting again. I understand what you mean, but in this day and age, although we have ownership of our content, we lose control over anything we post online. The only thing we can do is make sure we have backups in case something goes wrong so we can rebuild it again.

            @Holly – Yes, this can get confusing as ownership and control are sometimes connected to each other but doesn’t apply in some situations like in the Internet. Thanks for taking the time to answer Mrinal’s comments and keeping this discussion alive. :)

          2. @Holly: I think you took that I didn’t like article. It was never my point. In fact it is good. You did a good job. I totally understand that once thing is on internet – It belongs to everyone! I have even been thrashing blogs who ask people to disable ad blocker, click on share etc – force user to do something to read the blog articles etc. As spirit of blogging is to keep things open source.

            I meant no offence.

            Regarding time. Yes such platform can save time. If you ever look at my blog, I was pretty good a year back. Writing tech articles but as job and life got busier… I am writing things like giveaway etc mostly or nothing at all. Maintaining is completely other task.

            Thank you all.

    1. Thanks for stopping by my friend. Yes, do check out Glipho when you have the time. Maybe you can make it connect to Zurker so users can publish their posts on Glipho into Zurker? Vice versa.

      1. If Zurker had better navigation and a more attractive interface, I might have become active there. But it doesn’t. And I’m about to leave altogether – getting REALLY tired of the nagging to BE active to show it off for potential backers.

        Thanks for the reminder to clean up my social media presence, Nick!

        1. Zurker’s interface is much better now than it was a few months back and the navigation has also improved although it there’s still much to work on and Nick has acknowledged that.

          It’s hard when you’re working by yourself and on a tight budget.

          I guess we can’t compare it to Facebook or Google+. Zurker works different from other social networks because everyone are considered owners and as such, users have the responsibility to do something for the network to make it work/grow, be it through posting regularly or backing it up financially.

          Just my two cents. ;)

          1. I agree, there have been some improvements. I just don’t like the tone of the emails, and I’m not sure I understand this “ownership” model. If it were a friendlier, more interesting place, I’d have contributed more. So I’ll take that criticism, JP – I haven’t done much of that. But I haven’t felt a great push (other than those pushy emails) to do it.

          2. P.S. Nick, I do apologize for not making this clearer – if you’re truly the ONLY developer working on this, it’s fairly impressive. I’d have thought there were a few more. But the rest of what I said stands.

    2. I sent you a private message this morning, Nick, but wanted to say it publicly, as well: Thank you for changing the tone and content of your emails. I returned to the site this morning with a completely different feeling towards it and you – not that I’m ready to be all that “active” there, yet, but that’s just general time constraints. I just wanted to acknowledge that I’ve noticed, over recent months, that the emails are more interesting and inviting.

  2. Very interesting and intriguing prospect. I clicked a link in your tweet one time and it dropped me off at glypho. I was annoyed and puzzled. I thought it was a content scraper to be honest. I must have made a racket in annoyance,but I was soon appeased when I was whisked to my destination – your blog. Perhaps I inadvertently pressed an eject button. Not sure but I was pleased I got out though. Sorry,Glyph peeps.

    1. Hahahaha…yes, come hang out over there, Jan. It’s not annoying at all, and you’ll find lots of great blogs to read. There IS a blogging world outside of SEO, MMO, and writers writing about writing! ;)

    2. Hello my friend! Good to see you back online and visiting my blog.

      Really? You know I don’t spam my readers or followers, right? Well anyways, I’m glad that you ended up here on my blog. Hope you’re doing okay and please do let me know once you’ve started blogging again ok? :)

    1. Yep, I think Glipho would work well as a second or backup blog just in case something happens to your existing blogging platform. Regarding how long it’ll last, I think only time will tell. :)

  3. Thanks for sharing about Glipho! I just signed up and finished setting up my profile. I’m also checking out the UI and learning how to use it.

    For now, I don’t see myself switching away from WordPress, but I think Glipho is an ideal tool for those who are just starting out or those who are looking to expand their exposure in the Internet and Social Media.

    1. Agreed! Exactly my point when I said that I think Glipho will win by NOT trying to be the “replacement” for our other favorite platforms. It plays nicely with others, and I think that if those others play nicely with it, it’ll be a nice addition to the whole social media suite.

      1. I think that’s a very good idea since it would take a very “special” product/service to compete with the existing players.

        Btw, I have a question for you. Do you repost your blog posts on Glipho or do you write totally different posts? Coz I was thinking about the issue of duplicate content since Glipho allows users to import posts from existing blogs.

        1. I never worry about the duplicate content thing, so long as they’re all on MY blogs. I haven’t noticed any penalties. I try not to duplicate whole blogs (unless it’s temporarily, as a backup – you can still find most of jahangiri.us/new over at perspectivesii.wordpress.com – except for the 2012 entries, which are somewhere in my GMail backups – and that’s a GOOD reason to subscribe to your own blog by email!!) I only get upset at scrapers and sploggers and content thieves.

          BUT, having said that, I do try to just use a summary and add something – a reason for Glipho readers to go visit my main blog, too! I don’t want them to ONLY visit and read my stuff on Glipho. Where’s the fun in JUST duplicating content, where that content is the point – rather than a product or service?

          1. Oh ok. Just being careful coz I had an issue with Big G that fortunately was resolved. Yes, I am subscribed to my own blog. I do it so that I have a backup of all my posts and so that I can see what the readers/subscribers see.

            Yes, that makes sense. Thanks for the tips. I’ll try to do that once I get the time to post on Glipho.

        2. Hi JP,

          Regarding the duplicate content issue, if you use the importing tool on Glipho you won’t have these issues. We make sure to set the specific meta tags to tell search engines your content on Glipho has been syndicated from the original source.

          1. Hi Roger,

            Thank you for taking the time to visit my blog just to explain about the duplicate content issue. Glad to know that Glipho is taking care of that issue for its users. More power!

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