E-lusion

There’s something interesting happening in the space between TwitterTwitter

and a full blown blog. We’re seeing more and more of our social friends turn to sites like PosterousPosterous

for 140 character plus musings, or simple and fast photo and video sharing.

Whether you need a little more space to create a lifestream that serves as a compliment to your Twitter presence, or you’re looking to totally replace your existing personal or group blog, Posterous makes the transition and posting process dead simple. The Posterous possibilities are endless, and the best part is it that takes very little effort to maintain your site and attract a subscriber base.

We’ll show you how to get started with Posterous and play with some of the more buried features that make it truly remarkable. Use this as your guide to uncovering the gems that make Posterous a glamorous blogging alternative and the email-to-blog-to-everywhere platform that strips the hassle out of blogging.

Getting Started

Send an email with whatever content you’d like — photos, videos, text, documents, audio, music — to post@posterous.com. That’s it. Your Posterous is alive and well, no account registration required.

Of course, if you want take advantage of the extra goodies, you’ll need to claim your account, but if all you want is a hassle-free email-to-web blog then you can continue to email post@posterous.com, update your site, and live happily ever-after.

Should you claim your Posterous, and we think you should, you’ll want to start by giving it a name, adjusting the site address (whateveryouwant.posterous.com) or adding in a custom domain, tweaking your comment and image/video download settings, and deciding whether you want to keep it password protected or open for the world to see. All of these options are accessible by clicking Manage and then selecting Edit Settings.

Make sure you add the bookmarklet to your browser so that you can do quick web posts while you browse. The browser add-on will grab photos, video, and text from a page, so that you end up with effort-free, content-rich posts.

If your shiny new Posterous is too naked for your liking, you have the option to import content from Bloggerblogger

, TumblrTumblr

, WordPressWordPress

, TypepadTypePad

, Moveable Type, and XangaXanga

. Go to the import page, select your service, entire your URL, username, and password and then choose to either merge the entire site or just individual posts.

Configure Autoposting Settings

Now that you have your Posterous account setup, you can optionally adjust which social services you’d like to share your content with simultaneously. The essential idea behind autoposting is that you can update Posterous once but distribute your content everywhere, or to the social profiles of your choosing.

From your dashboard, click the “Autopost to Everywhere” option in the right-hand sidebar. You’ll then be directed to your autoposting settings page, where you can click “Add a Service” to autopost to FacebookFacebook

, Twitter, FriendFeedFriendFeed

, JaikuJaiku

, PlurkPlurk

, Identica, Blogger, Tumblr, Livejournal, Typepad, Xanga, WordPress, DrupalDrupal

, Shopify, FlickrFlickr

, Picasa, YouTubeYouTube

, VimeoVimeo

, Scribd, and DeliciousDelicious

.

Posterous autoposting is intelligent, so if you post videos and you’ve configured your YouTube account, then your videos will be pushed to YouTube as well, no extra work required. The same holds true for the rest of the services, though with sites like Flickr and Facebook you do have additional, optional controls you can tweak to customize what gets posted and how it’s presented.

You’ll also notice that for each service you select, Posterous will monitor whether autoposting is active and let you view recent activity. Should autoposting fail for a particular site, this is the first place you should look when troubleshooting.

Starting a Group or Community Blog

You can have more than one Posterous, so if you want to start a second one for multi-user purposes, just create a new Posterous and configure the settings to allow anyone, or just contributors you specify, to update the site.

When editing your new site preferences, navigate to the “control who can do what” area to specify whether anyone can post or just contributors can post. The former of the options is the perfect way to set up a community powered blog, with submissions that you can moderate. The latter is a fantastic way to turn your Posterous into a group blog that doubles as an email list.

When it comes to adding contributors to a group blog, you’ll simply enter the email addresses of the individuals you’d like to allow to post to the Posterous. They’ll receive an introductory email with information on how to update the site, and then they’ll be able to email the group blog address with their content and have it post to the site. The functionality works just like an email list, so all contributors will receive an email with the new post content when any one of them updates the site.

Using Twitter Apps

Once you start regularly updating your Posterous, you’ll notice that it makes a perfect photo blog and may provide a better way to hold on to your Twittered photos than sites à la TwitPicTwitpic

that are specifically designed for Twitter photo sharing (one clear bonus is the added traffic and comments to your Posterous site). But, of course you still want to share photos with Twitter, and with Posterous you have an array of options.

The most basic way is the autoposting method described above. Your email or webposts can be configured to autopost to Twitter, no Twitter client needed.

If, however, you find yourself preferring to post photos via Twitter clients, you’ll find that Posterous has been integrated into a number of them as a photo sharing option you can use in lieu of TwitPic.

This means that should you want to share photos with Twitter and have them post to your Posterous simultaneously, you can do so using desktop apps like Seesmic DesktopSeesmic Desktop

, Tweetietweetie

for Mac, and Destroy Twitter, web apps like People Browser, FirefoxFirefox

tools like Power Twitter, and mobile apps like Gravity for Nokia, and Pichirp Pro, Twitterville, and Simply Tweet for iPhone.

Live Blog Pics and Vids

One of the cooler apps on the iPhone is Posterous’ app, PicPosterous [iTunes link]. It’s not like the typical photo sharing app, and instead turns your iPhone 3GS into a mobile utility for live photo and video blogging, while also transforming a Posterous entry into a dynamic post with fresh content as it happens.

You’re probably pretty familiar with the standard email or web posting options for Posterous, but PicPosterous presents a new option that’s anything but standard. To use it, launch the app and take a photo or video from within the app, or select one from your library. Photos and videos can be shot in landscape or standard mode. Use your first photo or video to create a new album. The content will be posted as a new post to your Posterous.

Should you be chronicling a night on the town, live video blogging a conference, or capturing photos from your family function, you can then update the same album with your new content, and your initial Posterous post will be refreshed with the new updates.

Tips and Tricks

Email Tagging: Tagging posts is the best way for visitors to find content pushed off the main page. Tagging posts via email is a convenient way to ensure that your content gets properly bookmarked and saved when updating on the run.

To tag your email posts, add this syntax to your subject line: ((tag: tagname, tagname2)). It’s that simple.

Custom Email Options: Say you’ve configured your autoposting options but are sharing a pic that you want to post to Posterous, send to Twitter and Flickr, but skip Facebook. With the practically unlimited variety of custom email addresses, you can do just that.

For this particular scenario, instead of emailing post@posterous.com, send your post to flickr+twitter@posterous.com. To post only to one particular site, send your email to servicename@posterous.com (eg. twitter@posterous.com). The options are endless, but the bottom line is that you have complete control over where your content ends up.

Inline Photos: When you post multiple photos via email, Posterous automatically creates a gallery of those images. It’s quite nice to look at but it does force viewers to tab through the gallery to view each photo. If, however, you’d like all your images to appear inline in the same post, minus the gallery, just add this exact syntax to your subject line: ((nogallery)).

Add Analytics: You have a few options for measuring analytics for your Posterous site. You can use their dashboard to get a quick glimpse of site views and page views per post. You can also add in your Google Analytics Domain ID in the settings portion (Manage -> Edit Settings) of your Posterous account.

In addition, Posterous lets you track your RSS feed using Feedburner. Once you burn your Posterous RSS feed, you can paste the new feed URL in the Feedburner box (below the Google AnalyticsGoogle Analytics

box) and you’re all set.

Send Google Reader Items to Posterous: Google ReaderGoogle Reader

recently updated their feed reading app to support sharing your feed items with your social profiles. The new option is called “Send To” and it’s accessible via the Settings tab.

Should you select to enable Send To for Posterous, at the bottom of each item in your reader, you can click Send To to quickly post interesting items to your Posterous.

Original article posted on Mashable: http://mashable.com/ by Jennifer Van Grove: http://mashable.com/author/jennifer-van-grove/. See here: http://mashable.com/2009/09/06/posterous-guide/

An insightful timeline following the fate of our earth over the next few billions of years.

I have noticed a recent surge in users starting to use and adopt Posterous. One of the biggest reasons for this was the proclamation by Steve Rubel that he was killing his blog in favor of Lifestreaming and choosing to use Posterous as his new platform. As a result Steve has become the poster boy for Posterous (pun intended) attracting many people to try the service. His move caused a huge reaction on the web, some of which wasn’t positive. In a recent interview with Posteruous founder Sachin Argawal, he also acknowledged Steve’s use of Lifestreaming as a term that best describes his service.  I recently met Steve and told him that while I was happy he had brought huge attention to Lifestreaming, I believe that many people are confused by the term. My hope is to try and clarify some of that confusion here.

First off,  I’m not the Lifestram Nazi dictating what method you should use to create and populate your Lifestream. However, the concept that I cover is primarily as a way to aggregate the content we create or like on a multitude of services into a central location. To that point I wanted to show how Posterous is positioned with that method of Lifestreaming. Below I have provided what should hopefully be a clear diagram showing the differences between Posterous and the Lifestreeaming method I described.

Using the Lifestreaming method you post to various web services and then aggregate the content generated at each of them on your Lifestream. Your Lifestream can be located at a service like FriendFeed, Storytlr or many others, or it can be self hosted using Wordpress, SweetCron or many other options as well.

Posterous uses a different methodology in which you post all your content to their service first via email, bookmarklet, or a custom form and then optionally autopost that content to external services such as Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, and Youtube. The options for posting by email are flexible and powerful. You can specify which of the external services you want to autopost to on a per email basis by using  specific settings.

One of the biggest differences gleaned from these 2 methods is that a Lifestream allows the ability to publish from a limitless number of external sources that provide either an RSS feed or access via API whereas Posterous is limited by whatever can be published using their tools. For example, if I decide to “love” a track on Last.fm or add a book I’m reading at Goodreads, those actions can be automatically setup to publish to my Lifestream. In those examples I can use the native tools on the respective site to publish content to my Lifestream without having to do anything special. It would require me to take an extra step to do the same on Posterous. So basically Posterous is limited to the content you publish using their tools because they don’t offer the ability to import content from external sources. Until they offer this, I don’t consider them as a true Lifestreaming service. By the way, I see this as one of the key differentiators between Posterous and Tumblr which it is often compared to.

Now that just explains the differences in methodologies. It’s not to say that one couldn’t effectively use Posterous as a Lifestream or even find ways to incorporate generating content at external sites in a meaningful way on Posterous. In fact, many people are doing just that. I just wanted to bring some clarity to the differeces as I see them.  I have been enjoying using Posterous and find its posting and workflow options to be very powerful. There is a lot more to the service as well than just what I’ve covered here. Also,  I have discovered some great content that is being generated on the service and have started to follow some very interesting users on there and see a great community forming. I will definitely continue to play with and watch the service evolve.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Wow!

 

Paul:

Still having trouble seeing what Posterous can give me that Tumblr can't, maybe I'm not looking hard enough.

you:

One thing is that Posterous indexes a lot better in Google. Another is the easyness to blogging via mail. I know Tumbr has that feature too, but it is by far not so good as Posterous. For example: if you post an image to Tumblr you get it as an photo post with a title. With Posterous you can make a whole blog post with title, photo (even many photos as a photo collage!) and body with text, links and all.

you:

And if you posting a video to Posterous they automatically converts it and publish it with their own built in video player that is compatible with iPhone too!

you:

Another thing: Posterous can re post all your stuff instantly to other services like Twitter, Flickr, Youtube and many, many more. Try to do that with Tumblr...

you:

One more: the community on Posterous is a LOT better. They "Favorite" and commenting much more than and what they do on Tumblr.

you:

One more: the comment system. It's a really great built in comment system on Posterous where the comments builds up the content and can be posted to Twitter as @replies. On Tumblr you have DISQUS that you must install yourself and the comments are on their servers so you don't get any Google Juice frOm the comments.. Find more info about Posterous here: http://kb.clipotech.com/posterous

 

For the world's leading RSS reader, integrating social functions hasn't always been drop-dead simple and easy. With each new addition, be it the recent "Send To" features, the addition of "likes", or the ability to selectively enable friends to make comments on your shared items, the service needs to scale in a way that has brought many other Web-based feed readers to its knees - compounded by Google Reader's accelerating user base. And while the company works to make sharing and engaging simpler, I am already seeing a rapid rise in conversations within Google Reader, both on my own posts, and on those from others I share. Recently, the total number of comments on some posts has even eclipsed those natively here on my site, or on FriendFeed, Facebook or anywhere else.

Almost 600 people can comment on my Reader shares.
Since starting my shared items link blog in Google Reader a few years ago, I've passed along almost 10,000 links (a point I may pass by the end of the month). I recognize my pace of sharing between 20 and 30 items a day is on the high end, but these selections represent the top 4 to 5% of all articles I see online, with the intent of passing on only the best to those who consume the shares downstream. I've even had some people say they have unsubscribed from reading feeds directly, trusting me to be a human filter. That's a little daunting, but a task I can take.

You might remember that back in March, Google turned on comments on these shared items. Though activity was initially slow, I have seen increased velocity, especially after reorganizing my contacts.

As Google Reader does not have public comments on shared items that are visible to everyone, they have taken the middle road - showing these comments to those who are also subscribed to the shares, and only enabling those people to comment who have been added to a specific group by the sharer. After several hundred people had signed up to follow my shares, and I was seeing only a little activity, I realized the problem was mine, so I took some time to organize all my contacts, and enable everyone who follows with the ability to comment, just like in FriendFeed or Facebook. This part is critical, so if you do have a lot of people following your shares, go to your sharing settings in reader, and make sure that they are in a folder that has access.

Each of My Friends Is In a Group that Has Access to Commenting

This Article On Lazyfeed saw Dozens of Comments In Google Reader
With that change, people who may previously have been watching the shares go by, but couldn't comment, now can - and the results have been very interesting. Some of the more popular threads on shares from me have seen on the order of dozens of comments, even when the original post may only have shown a handful on the original blog.

Another Popular Topic of Discussion Within the Reader Shares
While a few years ago, this could have been considered the end of the world by some bloggers, the social Web has grown to understand that distributed conversations are taking place. By Google Reader enabling conversations to happen through their application, readers can act on the news immediately, without having to open a new window and participate there. It's also had me rethinking whether I should be self-sharing, in effect sharing my own posts when they get into Reader. I've personally tried to share only a subset of what I consider the best, but now that I have seen people engage right from within the app, it makes me think I should just share them all and enable the comments to take place where my readers are comfortable.

Now, every time I log into Google Reader, not only do I see new feed items to read, but I see new follower requests looking to see the shared link blog - and also, in bold, a "Comment View" which takes me to see all the comments, not just on items that I have shared, but on items shared by people whose shares that I follow. Google Reader, in a matter of months, has become a very serious part of the conversation. In light of the uncertainty around FriendFeed and how that company will integrate with Facebook, I am betting that some people are looking back at their RSS reader for information consumption and now, social discussion.

So go ahead, comment on my items in Google Reader. I don't need all the comments here. To find my shared items, head to: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/louisgray, and let's get connected.

Labels: Comments, Google, Google reader, RSS

You can find Louis Gray here: http://www.louisgray.com/ and also on FriendFeed here: http://friendfeed.com/louisgray