My good and bad of the Publish2 revamp

The Publish2 revamp has thrown me for a loop. That’s not fun. But this is not an angry post, or even one meant to be critical.

I am a great fan of Publish2. From its early days as a sort of inside journalism link-sharing service to its new, ambitious goal of being a full-fledged newswire, distributing across websites and print a customized, a la carte, better Associated Press (well, here’s more on that), I’ve enjoyed following its progress.

I’ve even used Publish2 a bit, posting links to stories I find useful for the blogging subject matter I’ve written about here, or simply things that I wanted to pass along. I’ve long been one of those people who enjoys stories, facts and anecdotes, as well as passing them along to interested people. It started in person, and it’s migrated through the years on e-mail, AIM, my old personal blog, Facebook and Twitter. Publish2 is an easy way to collect those links while still getting the word out, if I desire, through Facebook (via Selective Tweets).

After all, we forget that news can be the biggest driver of social media. We all want to be the town crier, and in this age, we can. Publish2 provides another avenue toward easing that task.

But now, with the revamp, I can’t find my old links. They only go back to May 26. The widget to the right of this post is only displaying one of those links. My “clips” — not really important, but a nice page to link to my meager writings — are gone. I thought this step forward would not mean starting over. Is this the case?

It turns out, those links aren’t gone forever — this Twitter status points out, “We’re importing old links in batches at the moment.” And the clips? Well, they are supposed to be somewhere, though they aren’t at the moment.

That’s good news. I wish I had gotten an e-mail about that — and if I did, my apologies, Publish2 folks. I guess I read over it. (I wish, too, that publishing the link to Twitter could be returned to the opt-out status I was able to use before — instead of either on or off in all cases.)

But I can be patient. After all, I’m merely using Publish2 for myself, not for a truly journalistic blog and not for a news organization. And the site has a lot of change to juggle right now, so there are bound to be some hiccups. I could be missing something — I browsed the FAQ but could easily have missed something.
And let me emphasize: While I don’t pretend to be an expert on what Publish2 is, or even how to quite use all its features, I think it’s a smart, innovative and gambling organization in a field that desperately needs such people.