It’s possible that the internet is going to keep me and many others in a permanent state of mental adolescence.
2009’s been a bad year for it – first there was Spotify, which instantly transformed my music listening and sharing habits. Then there was Twitter, which woke up after a year snoozing and ate my blog.
And now my world’s been realigned again: this time by Posterous.
I was alerted to it by Antony’s recent presentation, which gave it a special mention among things to watch out for in 2010. Since then I’ve gone slightly nuts for it.
Pre-Posterous printing press, 1930, from Seattle Municipal Archive
Others have done the hard work of describing what Posterous does: in short, it’s a tool that makes it absurdly easy to publish text/audio/images/video and push it to wherever else you’d like it go.
Apathy + telepathy
At its simplest and most powerful, it allows you to post almost anything via email – simply attach the document, jpeg or MP3 to your email – or just include a URL for it – and send to post@posterous.com. The subject field dictates the post title.
Send a bunch of photos (or links to photos) and it arranges them into a tidy gallery without being asked. If you’ve hooked up your Posterous account to Flickr, attached files will automatically be uploaded to your photostream as well. If you have another ‘proper’ blog you can you autopost to that too.
It also syncs with Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and most other things, with the capability of posting to one, several or all of them.
And – I haven’t yet tried this myself – but publish an audio file and it will turn it into a podcast, to which anyone can subscribe via iTunes.
You don’t even have to sign up for an account. Just send an email to post@posterous.com and you have your first blog post online. Short of telepathy, I can’t imagine a more user-friendly process.
Way of the web
The instant attraction of Posterous is symptomatic of a problem I’m usually reluctant to acknowledge.
I can bore for Britain about how revelatory, how revolutionary the internet is. But in the midst of my enthusiasms, I’m prone to gloss over the rubbish stuff – the information overload; the daily task of resetting some or other password; the ease with which you can be busy doing nothing.
The simplicity of Posterous reaffirms the inspiring possibilities, while dispensing with much of the tedious admin. Because on the one hand, it’s further reason to believe that super-easy, non-techie publication will draw the web into even more lives and areas of life – making it possible to find, connect, arrange and improve more of the stuff of life itself.
And on the other, it looks like a significant step towards a faff-free online future.
Header image credit: Flickr user Katie@!
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November 25th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Charlie, also worth noting a couple of other nice features:
Posterous allows for nifty domain management; I’ve applied my personal domain and it works nicely….http://www.mattlloydowen.com
And can sync. in with your Google Analytics account
Matt
November 25th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Great post Charlie, I’m a big fan too. I like the way it’s not such an ‘event’ when it comes to posting, now just one of the many emails that I fire off daily.
November 25th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Thanks both, good points
@Matt – haven’t yet worked out how to sync mine with Google Anaytlics, but that’s probably me being a numpty. Certainly seems a big plus over hosted Wordpress blogs.
@Chris – no. 4 seems like a good option (I’m not ready to abandon Wordpress just yet), but I’m also enjoying the social element of Posterous – I love the way you get notified about subscriptions to your feed without having to use Feedburner or Google Connect You’d lose that with a private Posterous. So I’m going to brave the perils of duplicate content a while yet, with occasional use of option 1 to keep things tidy.
November 25th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Thanks Charlie.
November 26th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
I love this post and totally agree with you.
A few years ago when we were explaining the wonders of web 2.0 we were thinking about how the means of production/distribution had been available to anyone with a computer and a web connection for some time (e.g. Geocities etc), but that the new wave of platforms just made it so much easier.
Posterous is the continuation of that trend. It just keeps getting easier and easier to publish to the world…
Yum.
November 27th, 2009 at 5:57 pm
Totally agree Posterous is the beginning of something big about usability and ease of publishing, and can see that be highly relevant to a lot of the people we work with in local communities – people who don’t have lots of techie skills but have interesting stories to tell.
we’re beginning a community reporters project in Brighton – http://www.scip.org.uk/community_reporters and you can imagine how great a platform this is for getting people to post stuff, irrespective of format, content or skills to set up and to blogging software
I mentioned something like this to Antony last time I saw him and am interested in seeing what this sort of project looks like from an iCrossing perspective
let me know if you want to know more…
Mark
December 1st, 2009 at 8:00 pm
Hi Mark, looks very interesting. I’m following the trail of links around your project, and finding out a lot more about community reporting….. will share with the content team here, cheers.
January 21st, 2010 at 11:10 am
Very interesting post. Some companies they have already seen potential in using Posterous. Check what Coca Cola’s ‘Fannovation’ site looks like http://bit.ly/8DKQAJ