Shawn Morrissey, over on the ASP.NET weblogs asks about cross-posting, and what is the best way. He talks about a server side solution that based on categories, posts your post to another blog. Then he talks about how you can use w.bloggar to do the same thing client side.

Personally, I use my own blogging tool that allows me to post to multiple blogs at the same time. For a while there, I was posting to four blogs at a time: My personal one, my GeekDojo one, my Sagestone one, and my Tourney Logic one. I have reasons to post to each one.

I post just about everything to my personal one. Why? Well, that's where you go to find out who I am - not just from one perspective.

I post technical content to GeekDojo. It offers me a larger audience than my personal blog does - or at least a different audience. I blog to get readers, but more importantly, I blog to provide content (and potentially, an answer) to those who want it.

My goal with the Sagestone blogs was to drive traffic to it. We just started them recently, and by posting my relavent technical content there, the traffic will increase. And it worked - Scoble linked to me over there, and my readership there has been higher.

We just started the Tourney Logic blogs to get our name out there, so I post technical and sports content over there to get some traffic. It's worked there so far. Of course, my link blog being there helps too!

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. I don't think a server side solution is the way to handle cross posting, but I guess that depends on your situation. I post technical content that I don't necessarily push to my work blogs but are in the same category as posts that I do syndicate to my work blogs. Allowing me to select at time of post client-side is a better option to me. That's how my tool works. As for categories, that's also handled client-side. When I post, I get a dialog of categories pulled from each blog, and choose which ones I want.

As for pinging, I think that's a server side task, but I can see doing that client side too. Either way, it seems to be others picking up my blog and linking to it, or google finding it as a better traffic driver than pinging servers.

Oddly enough, this post will only be available here. It's not being syndicated to multiple places.