What Happens After You Post?

Wired has released a Flash graphic that allows you to view the process that your blog post takes before the end-user sees it and it appears in feed readers. Although the process is quite complex, the graphic allows you to see the beginning to end travels of where the post goes, what the ping servers contact, what the readers see, and what goes back to the blog. 

You have a blog. You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you’ve written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers.

A short outline that the animation displays.

1. A blogger (you), creates an opinion and decides to blog about it.
2. You write the post on a hosting service that manages your blog (such as WordPress, Blogger, or Typepad.
3. After the post is published, ping servers maintained by Google Blog Search, Ping-o-matic, Yahoo’s blogs, and Weblogs.com are alerted. Spiders, software bots use the alerts received to crawl the blog for updates.
4. From here, the post will be indexed in search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and others, for the keywords found in your post and are more quickly added on Technorati or Google Blog Search.
5. Later on the post’s journey, it’ll meet data miners, text scrapers, spam blogs, and corporations which all collect (or steal) the content and thoughts of the bloggers, for marketing purposes, advertising, etc.
6. In the final steps, social bookmarks, aggregators, search engines, and online media will help bring the content to your reader, but not before connecting to contextual ad servers like Google AdSense, which trigger relevant ads to your post keywords.

Wired/Kevin Rose did a great job at achieving their goal – by creating an easy to read and follow linking of the way blog posting works, even for non-technical bloggers. Focused on the backbone of blogging, it can open your eyes to the seemingly extensive, yet simple for bloggers, travel that posts make before ending up in front of the post readers.

[via Weblog Tools Collection]