Posterous is Changing How I Think About Blogging
I have been giving a lot of thought to what the future looks like for blogging and where it fits in my life. I have no plans to stop, but as more action moves to the statusphere and my world gets more mobile, I have been looking for a new publishing approach.
Louis Gray, Steve Gilmor and I had a rather deep discussion about this at the Friendfeed meet-up a few weeks ago. I have also had some good conversations about this with my contemporary, Jeremiah Owyang, as well as the folks who work for Six Apart, Blogger and Disqus.
Now that I have been at it for over five years, writing a weblog is starting to feel very slow and antiquated. It's like a singles tennis player who focuses solely on the baseline game, logging long balls back and forth. The statusphere, on other hand, is like playing doubles - and at the net all the time. That's just one side of the story though. Another part of me feels strongly that in a world of "RTs" and "@s" a thoughtful blog post that adds value is downright refreshing. The right mix is a hybrid. I have long been an admire of Jon Gruber, who writes the outstanding Daring Fireball weblog. He has the right model. All day long he's posting on his blog pithy comments with links to "finds." Occasionally, he writes a longer analysis as he did today about PR and journalism (a must-read by the way). He is also active on Twitter but for conversation. That's a great model to follow. But how do I do so when I am often on the go? Enter Posterous. If you haven't seen it, Posterous is outstanding because it can serve as a front end for all of your out-bound publishing. It works entirely by email. When I email Posterous the content immediately gets posted to my lifestream site, but it also goes to certain other venues depending on how I address the message. Posterous also has a ton of other features that I love like easy tagging and also traffic statistics that you can see for every one of my posts. (For more browse this archive.) Lately I have been shifting more of my reading/sharing to my iPhone. Some days I probably spend as much time or more time browsing the web from my mobile device than I do my laptop. Now that I have a new iPhone 3GS, I also want to do more with photos and video. Posterous seems like the great hybrid solution since I can share things in different places based on context and easily do so through via email. So what does this mean for you as a reader? Nothing. You will get what you have come to expect from me right here on my blog. And if you subscribe my lifestream, you will get even more. My friends on Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook will get a mix. It appears to be the ideal front end for the active publisher. How do you decide what to publish where and when? One medium doesn't replace the other but we need more hybrids like Posterous.
Comments 7 Comments
Adding links was easy from Gmail, much easier than within the Typepad app on the iPhone, but I still need to figure out how to add tags from Gmail. I do like running things from my nerve centre there.
Many thanks!
I am really excited to give Posterous a test run. It seems like a terrific platform.
Thanks again.
Seems to me that the ideal new model falls somewhere between being too 'noisy' by lifestreaming everything and being to quiet/self focused by blogging only personal thoughts. Cherrypicking the best web 'shares' tweets, links etc seems the way to go and overtime shares a truer individual picture. Perhaps that's what this approach should be called - 'cherrypicking'?
I've been experimenting with this approach on my homepage with Tumblr, but it does seem that Posterous may be a more suitable platform. Thanks for your thougts.