Oh, the joys of the Internet. We’re living in a golden age where there’s no shortage of tools to do pretty much anything online, from posting blogs to uploading movies to making blogs about posting movies about blogs to…….
Well, anything really.
With Twitter (I’m here – drop by and say hi!) as the glue which holds everything together like a central sticky gluey hub of awesomeness, the name of the game is content proliferation with your words and images being pulled from one service to another as your wishes dictate.
For example, it’s a simple enough matter to pull a YouTube video into a blog post. More useful still, you could have your blog auto-update your Twitter account via Twitter Feed (or automagically, if your blogging platform supports it). That Twitter feed can then trigger a change in your Facebook status, meaning your blogpost isn’t just “out there” waiting for Google to find it or your stalwart band of RSS followers (hi, fans!) to pick it up – it’s out there on Twitter, Facebook and all of the other fantastic sites which pick those up, and the circle continues. As circles are wont to do.
Other services take this propagation paradigm further still, with Posterous and Twitblogs leading the pack for innovation. If there’s ever two site which need to get in bed together, it’s these folks.
With Posterous, I can write a blogpost in an email client (fact: I’m doing it right now) meaning you can post from anything you can send an email – no dedicated client or browser needed. And you have access to all of the functionality your mail client offers, from saving drafts to spell-checking. The content is divorced from the delivery mechanism – a true platform-neutral blogging engine. Brilliant.
But that’s not all – Posterous takes content proliferation and runs with it, cross-posting your posts to twitter, another blog, Facebook or wherever. This means you can email….. well, pretty much anything, so almost any site, anywhere, all through Posterous.
There’s still a few things I need to work out with Posterous, such as setting the tags in a post, and work out how to get it to cross-post into WordPress into a certain Category (is this possible, I wonder), but it’s also got some of the best embedding tech I’ve seen with attached photos automatically turning into an image gallery, and uploaded movies displayed in an embedded player. Nice.
Twitblogs on the other hand is a raw, straight-to-twitter blog system that relies on Twitter to push the content to other systems. The emphasis here is on allowing folks to use their twitter username and password and no additional signup required. It’s a blog overlay that allows more than 140 character posts with twitter being fed the title and link. Simple, clever.
The key is what to use all of this wonderful newtech for.
If, like me, you already have a well-established blog then why use Posterous or Twitblogs at all? In my case, In a word: segregation.
For example, I plan to use my Posterous account for tech posts. These will feed into all of the other sites too as well as hit my twitterstream. Twitblogs I’ll reserve for more opinion style posts that will drop directly into Twitter but go nowhere else. That’s the off-my-chest stuff that doesn’t need to clutter up the rest of my blogspace.
Sorted!
Hey Greywulf
From Twitblogs response: Nice article and thanks for the mention.
From Roger: I think for us established bloggers using these ‘new’ blog platforms is a debate but you have some great ideas on how Twitblogs would be useful that I think are pretty clever.
I used to blog loads too (techwinter.com) and so I can totally relate.
For me I really think Twitblogs and even Posterous (okay I will be nice) are really going to be very popular with new users to blogging and not as much the old guard like us.
What do you think?
Hey Roger, thanks for stopping by.
Me, I think we “old guard” need to keep a close eye on emerging tech like twitblogs, posterous and twitter itself otherwise we’re missing out on all the fun. Someone’s got to show these youngsters how to make the best uses of all the good stuff – and who better than us oldies? :D
Given a choice, I’d love to see twitblogs’ zero-signup and direct hotlink into twitter merged with posterous’ mail-as-a-blog-client system. I can but dream though, eh?
I’ll certainly be keeping a close eye on both, that’s for sure.
Thanks, again!
I hope we surprise you :)))