July 2009 Archives
Here's an excellent piece by ReadWriteWeb COO Bernard Lunn on the future of the book publishing business. Think about the forces at work in this swirling vortex: traditional publishers, distributors and bookstores; mega-distributors like Amazon.com; eBooks like Kindle; Google, with its aggressive digitization programs; and self-publishing. Do books have a future? Indeed they do. There will always be a place for deep content and ideas that endure. I have books on my shelf that have outlasted my last six computer systems. They have never "checked for updates" or crashed on me. Their very presence is a comfort to me. They smell good.
Take a moment and give books their due. Quoting Henry Ward Beecher: "a little library, growing every year, is an honorable part of a man's history. It is a man's duty to have books."
Yes, I'm writing this article on Posterous using my traditional blogging tool, Movable Type. The irony is not lost on me. And no complaints about MT - it's easy to use, stable, and very well behaved.But Posterous is innovative in some important ways. If you have held off on blogging because it just seemed like too much work, or seemed too limiting, you may want to jump in with Posterous.
Here are some of the cool things you can do with Posterous:
You can blog via email. Just attach a photo, write an email and send it to Posterous. It magically appears on your blog. The subject line is your blog post title. The body content is the entry. The photo is sized automatically. Full links are clickable.
You can blog on your mobile device. Let's say you're at an event with your iPhone. You take a picture, write a cutline, and email it to Posterous. You're liveblogging, now, baby. Grab an iPod Touch and blog your way across Europe. As Ram Dass might say, "Blog Here Now."
It's rich media friendly. Email an MP3 to Posterous and the tool knows to wrap the file in an MP3 player. Record a voice memo on your iPhone and send it. Email a YouTube link and it embeds automatically.
Posterous lets you scrape the web. Drag the Posterous toolbar to your browser. Then, when you find content online that you want to blog, click and it opens a window. Choose from available images on the page, write a title, write your comments, and click - you've blogged it, and you're back to your web trawl.
Posterous ignites your networks. Your post is auto-magically distributed to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, or any other popular network you choose.
You can still blog the old-fashioned way from a control panel - useful if you want to clean up a mobile post, for example. Some other features: It's easy to point your Posterous blog to your web domain, if you wish. You can install Google Analytics with one line of code. And Posterous has a Tumblr-like network feature that keeps you in touch with other Posterous bloggers.
I do have some concerns: Posterous accelerates our "Remix" culture, and probably runs over some copyrights by making it ever-easier to repurpose protected content. From a design standpoint, Posterous is clean and effective, but there's just one theme. I have to believe the service will soon allow its customers to reskin their sites.
I first learned of Posterous when Steve Rubel moved his work (formerly Micropersuasion) to the tool. He's changed his blogging style since the switch; shorter posts, more web scrapings, more frequent updates. More interactive. As he says, it's lifestreaming, a bridge between Twitter and a blog.
Here's a nice guide on using Posterous, courtesy of Old Media, New Tricks.
From SteveRubel.com: Getting the Mosterous from Posterous
