The Steve Rubel Lifestream

Big move! you've convinced me to test out Posterous too... why'd you choose them, though, over Tumblr? Also - I'm missing disqus commenting - it seemed more friendly to people and more universal

also i'm quickly missing re-posting! seems like a feature they'd explore in the future

Honestly, the design is better over there but the features rock here. Especially auto-posting and email. They will get the theming part right next.

Bummer.... I'll be honest, I really prefer to only see your longer, more detail pieces like we were used to seeing at Micro Persuasion, without the other shorter/video/random things that I see here. Is there any way to subscribe to only the "meaty" pieces?

So I'm curious why you decided not to use this as the hub and keep the blog as one of the spokes?

I have found posterous very powerful,

Hey, when you get to a fork in the road, take it!

I'm with you Aaron

Tac, double content will penalize you with Google.

...But even Posterous has a blog? Seems like something will be missing without the depth of a blog.

For those of you who want just the essays, you can get it here. I will put it in the title of these posts. http://bit.ly/MQz1M

@Evan Posterous is a blogging platform - but so much more.

One thing I can't figure out is how to make permalinks - is posterous basically saying that the "atomic level" (for linking) is the post?

This page is the permalink.

Yea, and this is a little bit of a problem -- it shows a disrespect for that importance of citation (and that is too bad).

I would have no problem if it were hierarchical and CENTERED around the page, but basically prohibiting citation within the page is foolish (you COULD say it's ahead of the curve, but that would be open to debate ;)...

So this is a bug, not a feature.

In this particular case I am the "customer" - and the customer is always....

:) nmw

*the* importance of citation (editing would be a nice feature, too ;)

NMW, I don't follow. Can you clarify?

I can't link to anything within the page/post -- no nested replies, etc.

This would be fine if all EVERYONE did was to post (but then who would need comments at all? ;)

Maybe comments are indeed a thing of the past - I think what killed them was Google's "nofollow".

So basically this "within post" stuff is a HUGE can of worms, and I don't think I am up to dealing with EVERY individual aspect of it at the moment.

All I am saying right now is that to disable linking to sections within a post/page is a little foolhardy (IMHO).

Steve, after talking about this the other day it was so difficult to visualize aggregating your 'outlets' all in one. But this layout and the flow seems to really work. I've got my site, my tumblr, twitter, facebook, linkedin, and a whole bunch of other streams going on that if this works out for you maybe I'll have to take the plunge. Good luck with this effort - I'm hoping we all learn something from it.

Well, if I dig into the HTML source I can find something like a permalink (e.g. for the above comment it would be http://www.steverubel.com/its-official-i-am-moving-from-blogging-to-lif#pcomment_commentunit_418428 ) -- but it isn't really user-friendly to make that so difficult.

I agree that taking away a lot of the structure make the page look a lot cleaner, but I think it's a little overboard -- almost seems like draconian aversion to basic principles of citation.

And that, I feel, is a folly -- and should be fixed (otherwise this software will probably remain a wallflower).

first time being here,Amazing

Steve, what is the fundamental difference between posterous and a regular blog? or better yet, between posterous and Friendfeed? (I, as the reader of the site, don't care what is the platform you use to publish content...)

Eyal, I would say that Posterous is more free form. It can be just a photo or a movie or three words or 10,000. Blogs really have posts.

Good on you, Steve!

I read your post and had to check things out. I have had a posterous account, but never used it. I looked at it as Tumblr, without the style. Now I have all my auto-posting setup, to Tumblr as well, go figure.

I am going to give this a shot using it as you do, as the hub feeding the spokes. I am rather excited.

Thanks for the heads up as I would have never logged in here again. Posterous would have become just another unused account in the collection.

Cheers,
Eban

Can't you do that with friendfeed?

so if I don't have a blog yet, can I start with a free lifestream site ?
OK. I can google for it.
:)

I made the move to posterous a few weeks ago. It is a new life. So much easier!

It is a dream!

My advice to everyone is: go there!

Whatever happened to "make every post a signal"? Now I feel like I'm getting too much from this RSS.

This encouraged me to do the same. But, how do you handle the occurring doubling in FriendFeed resulted from the autopost feature? E.g. You post a video to posterous, it will get posted to Youtube and FriendFeed. But FriendFeeds puls also you Youtube Videos. Now the same video is listed twice in FriendFied.

@Mathias Very simple, I use the special email feature. It's a feature Posterous has. I send email to a special posterous address just to get it into Posterous and Facebook (see autopost settings). Then Friendfeed scoops up my RSS feed. Once that's done, Friendfeed syndicates into Twitter. Things only should appear once in each place.

@Eyal not really. Not like this.
@Citing Baltimore - nearly every post will be quality

Thanks Matthias for the question and Steve for the answer. I was wondering the same thing.

I've been thinking about what you did, Steve, and I'm not sure I get why, yet. Despite your post - and others since - I don't understand why you gave up your previous platform for Posterous. Lifestreaming is a concept and not a format per se. And Posterous is just another tumble blog, another content management system; I just can't see the difference.

I guess, I'm wrestling with the decision to go with Posterous over some self-hosted system. Because when the next big platform comes out, what do you do? Leave this behind and have two archived systems - your blog and this?

I've introduced a lifestream to my blog as a separate page from my content. But I could have easily included all of my micro-formats like Twitter, Plurk, etc, and media posts from Vimeo & Flickr into the main content area of the blog and turn the blog's format into more of what Posterous is like.

Perhaps your previous content management system didn't have the power of WordPress (which I use as my lifestream platform). And don't get me wrong... I love the idea of a lifestream and can see how it can be better than the classic blog. But why throw away your old content system for one that might not be supported in a few years.

Thanks to you, though, I'm going to give Posterous a shot but I'm not sure I want to use it as a hub... and maybe that's why I don't fully understand where you're coming from. Posterous might be easy to use but I don't know if its any different than other CMS systems. Maybe you'll continue to share how you set yours up so I can understand the logic behind it all.

I just did the same with my primary website. Just one question Steve. Do you use only gmail.com or also some desktop client such as outlook, Mail, Entourage...etc.?

Thx. Using hotmail here :) Have only some probs with fonts. But I find posterous the best and fastest way to blog today

Posterous really changed the way we perceive blogging. Too many blogs with too many words and too little real content: this is way better, I couldn't agree more.

What a provocative topic! And it occurs to me, the more I reflect about what Steve's said about the switch is that the move to posterous is much more about how you want to share the stream of thoughts you're observing than about the format you're chosing to manage the content digitally. I was struck from the beginning about the autoposting and emailing tricks and love the browser button.Those tools just fit the way I move. Because of that fit, I've been thinking about bringing my biz blog over into for the last 4-5 months, daily. Still not sure how to integrate the two focii though. I started the posterous to track things I was observing and reflecting on that fall between the lines of business and personal. I'm still trying to keep my wordpress blog "on topic" as a biz blog. Wondering what you think about making distinctions like that... Maybe they're losing their punch these days as we're thinking faster and faster in a swarm...?

Posterous does have some nice features, but it seems to lack one really important one for lifestreaming: pulling in content from other sources. If it's going to be a hub--a place where folks come to see all the stuff I've been thinking about and doing online--there needs to be a way to tell it, when I bookmark a site on Delicious, pull it in. When I make a Disqus comment, pull it in, etc.

Going the other way, and posting through Posterous out to other sites doesn't always work-- e.g. making a Disqus comment. Or even adding photos to Flickr. I can add them at high resolution and they appear at a nice size for the web automatically on Tumblr. But if I use Posterous and go the other direction, I'm going to lose that hi-res photo on Flickr, no? (Maybe I'm not, please correct me if I'm wrong.)

For me, a combination of Tumblr and FriendFeed works best now, tho not without its hassles. Posterous would solve some of those hassles, but without being able to pull in feeds, it's a non-starter for me.

Welcome onboard! I think you'll see alot more interesting conversations on Posterous... not to mention the cool plans they have!

Here's the question I keep coming back to with Posterous (and other 3rd party platforms) ... who owns the content, and what happens to it if Posterous shuts down? I've been blogging for ~4.5 years, and I own the content - it's all there in the WP database should I choose to port to another platform.

With Posterous, can I do that?

A bigger question is - should I care?

@Jim you own all the content you post to Posterous. And you can export it all our of our service anytime using our API:
http://posterous.com/api

We'd never lock you in.

@Sachin - Thank you so much for your response, and for the speed of the response. I feel a bit better now about using your great product/service/thing? :)

My larger question remains ... how many people care about their content ownership?

@Jim: Thats dead simple: Subscribe to your own RSS feed and you will have your local copy.

I am new to Posterous, its a really great idea