Martin Young’s Posterous

Hilarious article from Danny Katz in yesterday's Age.

RISE up, O Macintosh computer comrades of Melbourne, rise up and wave your fist with indignation! Raise your tastefully designed fist, in aesthetically pleasing indignation.

More at http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/forbidden-apples-not-so-sweet-20090701-d55f.html

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Lovely

Photo: Chris Hocking. Source: http://ski.com.au

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Although I'm new to Posterous I'm pretty sure I'm doing the right thing: I'm writing blog posts in Gmail and emailing them to blog@posterous.com, which posts a new post on Posterous and also autoposts the post to my martinjy.com blog. (Phew, that's a lot of 'posts' in that sentence.)

But the HTML of the posted posts is a nightmare of multiple line breaks. Where are the nice tidy paragraph tags that I'm used to in Wordpress? And when I tried to use a blockquote tag on my most recent post that failed completely.

I wonder if switching to plain text in gmail will help?

I guess I'll have to give it a try to find out.

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Cool, the Nike+ people emailed me with an update on the new SportBand (I'm not special - I'm on the Dodgy SportBand Mailing List). Here's are the important bits from the email:

Dear Martin,

Thank you for requesting information on the Nike+ SportBand. We have great news for you!

The 2009 SportBand is coming soon. We have made some updates for 2009 that include an enhanced display screen for better visibility, welded construction for improved water resistance, and we now offer two new colors: Yellow and Pink with grey accents. The new SportBands will be in US stores in late July with other countries to follow in August.

To make your running experience even better, the Nike+ SportBand will connect you to the all new nikeplus.com. We've updated our website with a new look, enhanced features, and new ways to connect with friends. Nikeplus.com continues to be the place to track your runs, challenge your friends, get coaching tips, and be part of a growing global community. Look for the new site to launch this summer in the US, with other country sites to follow soon.

Please check nikeplus.com in your country of residence for more news and details.

If you have had performance issues with your 2008 SportBand related to display or water resistance, you can exchange it for a new one. Please take your Nike+ SportBand to the original place of purchase for assistance. We have made arrangements with our authorized retailers all over the world to handle Nike+ SportBand returns.

If you reside in the U.S. please visit our Returns Guidelines page for additional return information.

Whether you are training for a marathon or want an easy way to track your runs, Nike+ and the 2009 Nike+ SportBand are here to help you get more from your run, every time.

Thank you and keep on running!

The Nike Running Team

I'm not sure whether to return mine to the original place of purchase or Nike. My first SportBand was bought from a FootLocker in Geelong but when the display broke I rang Nike Australia, who told me to send it to them. The new one they sent me is also now stuffed, so presumably I return it to them. I guess I'll find out in due course.

It's nice to get an update though. Thanks Nike.

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http://www.andyrutledge.com/styling-text-links.php

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I spent most of yesterday looking closely at three lifestreaming services: Posterous, Friendfeed and Tumblr. The catalyst for this research was high-profile blogger Steve Rubel's declaration this week that he's abandoning his blog in favour of a Posterous lifestream. In one of his posts he explains the lifestream concept quite succinctly:

I like to think of lifestreaming as today's digital equivalent of Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks. (Make no mistake, I am no Da Vinci nor do I think of myself in such a way. It's purely an aspirational metaphor.) Da Vinci recorded notes, drawings, questions and more in his notebooks. Some of these were quite mundane (grocery lists and doodles), others were not. But the body of work was over time, a view of a one individual's mind (in his case a great one).

I've already set up martinjy.com to display my latest activity on the web (scroll down to the footer and you'll see three columns), but (1) those columns only show the last 10 or so bookmarks, tweets and photos, and (2) although they display activity in reverse chronological order individually, they don't do that in a combined way. A lifestream takes all that activity and chronicles it in the order that it happened. So what's on offer?

Tumblr

http://martinjy.tumblr.com. Tumblr is simple to set up. You establish a Tumblr account, tell it about your other web accounts (Flickr, Delicious, Twitter etc), then every hour or so it checks those accounts and aggregates the activity at your personal Tumblr URL. If you're just using Tumblr to aggregate your other web activity there is nothing else to do - you just continue to use the other web services as usual and Tumblr does the aggregating for you.

Tumblr also offers you the ability to use it as your blog - you can post text, photos, links, video and audio directly to it via the web interface or an iPhone app. Followers of your Tumblr stream can comment on your direct Tumblr activity (if you enable it), but they can't comment on the activity that Tumblr aggregates from your other web presences. It looks like a blog, too, although some of the available themes dilute that a bit.

Friendfeed

http://friendfeed.com/martinjy. Although it presents differently, Friendfeed is similar to Tumblr, in that (1) you can tell it about your other web presences and let it aggregate that content, and/or (2) you can post directly to it via its web interface and use it as a blog, although posts appear to be short-form, i.e. not formattable with things like lists or blockquotes. Videos and audio are posted as links (not with an embedded player like Tumblr).

FF looks less blog-like; it looks a bit like Twitter, in fact. Longer posts are truncated and photos are resized so that each post is only a few lines high.

Posterous

http://martinjy.posterous.com. Posterous is interesting because it kind of works in reverse. You tell Posterous about your other web presences, but instead of aggregating your activity from them, Posterous wants your content first. It asks you to email your tweets, photos, blog posts and bookmarks to it, and it subsequently autoposts that content to the appropriate place. This is where Steve Rubel gets his Da Vinci metaphor from: Posterous acts as a digital notebook.

It looks like a blog, but at the moment there's no way to change the theme (although you can use a custom domain), so all Posterous blogs look identical.

My opinion

I can see why there's hype around Posterous. It makes it dead simple to publish content to a central URL yet retain web presences on the dedicated sites. Using email as the input mechanism does away with logins, and I (somewhat) like the focus on content, not design.

I'm not sure if/how it handles EXIF data on images that I want to post to Flickr, or whether I can format emailed blog posts with HTML, or whether I'll find myself logging into all the web services anyway to participate in conversations there, or how it'll all turn out in general, but I'm going to give it a try for a while.

P.S. I started with this blog post - I wrote and sent it via email, and Posterous should have auto-posted it to my blog. Let's hope it did.

*Update* - it did, but it put a whole heap of ugly breaks into the content that I had to remove. Not sure if that's Posterous's fault or Gmail's.

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