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On several occasions I have gushed about Posterous, the life-streaming/blogging tool. I used it for most of the past year but put it aside a couple of days ago. At least for my personal use. Several of our company blogs are using posterous.

I had to stop for sort of a silly reason. I kept sending personal stuff to one of the company blogs. Not good. The only sure way to avoid this was to pull the plug on the personal account.

I like having a place I can quickly share something of interest and it was there all the time, in Google Reader. For me it does all that I liked about posterous (with a few bonus features). Latest links are back in the sidebar.

“Journalism is like skiing in the 50s or 60s”

An interesting analogy by Dave Winer:

“Previously it had been a sport that very few people enjoyed, and they were all very good. But now the doors are opening to amateurs. The pros have to share the slopes with people who don’t take the sport as seriously as they do. They’re still going to be able to ski, but the rest of us are not just going to admire them for how skilled they are, we’re going to do it too. They can earn a living as ski patrol and ski instructors. Or lift operators or more mundane jobs like people who work in hotels and drive the shuttle bus. There are still jobs in skiing after the arrival of the amateurs. But the exclusivity is gone.”

I think he might have nailed it. Oh, for the days before the lift lines were long and the slopes clogged with morons who didn’t know the right way to come down the hill.

Too much stuff

This PBS program on design has stuck with me for a couple of days. In one of the segments, a designer said something about removing everything that is not essential until all that remains is the essential. (This MacBook is a very nearly perfect example of that aesthetic.)

The same, I suppose, could be said of the theme I chose for this blog (the theme… not my execution). Thesis is the creation of Chris Pearson. More creative types have done all sorts of wonderful things with Thesis but I like the way it looks “right out of the box.”

I have gone through phases where I thought I could add a little “pizazz” to a site. If you have that designer gene, you can pull it off. If not, more is less. Knowing that –and lacking the gene– I shoot for simple. And let’s face it, nobody comes to a website twice because it looks cool.

I just finished a book by Deepak Chopra in which he says something about simplicity as an element of happiness. I’m paraphrasing here: If you acquire something, give something away. Sort of, “stuff neutral.” I’m going to give that a try because I clearly have too much stuff.

PS: So much for “less is more.” Got to playing with Thesis options and figured I’d play around with a header image for a few days.

Tagging

When I first encountered the concept of tagging, it seemed a little… obsessive? I’ve always been pretty good about organizing things into folders and the idea of “meta data” was mostly lost on me. In the last few years, however, I have become a believer. As good as search has become (on the desktop and in the cloud), there’s just too much stuff.

  • smays.com – 4,707 posts
  • flickr – 1,744 images
  • iPhoto – 2, 670 images
  • YouTube – 132 videos
  • Posterous – 374 posts
  • Twitter – 4,933 (no tags but you can star)

And that’s not much stuff compared to many others. Which brings me to mail. I use Apple Mail at work and here on the MacBook. Compared to Outlook, it’s very lean and basic. Has a notes and to-do feature (that I don’t use), but basically just does mail, with a spare, clean interface.

When it comes to email, there seems to be two schools of thought:

  1. Save everything in one folder. Or, difficult as it is for me to believe, just leave everything in the in-box or the deleted folder. Our Help Desk guys tell me it’s not uncommon to find 20,000 emails in one of these folders. These are the keep-it-all-and-search folks.
  2. Delete emails quickly or save in one of several folders. I fall into the latter group.

Where was I headed with all of this? Oh, tags.

I don’t have all that many emails but now that I have the tagging bug, I find myself wanting to tag my emails, so I’m trying out a little Apple Mail plug-in called MailTags. It’s not very pretty (which is unusual) but works pretty well. And it gives me the option of editing the subject line of an email. Don’t get me started on clueless subject lines.

If you’d like to know more about tagging, I recommend Everything is Miscellaneous, by Dr. David Weinberger.

Do you need a “website?

My pals at the local yoga center have been asking for my advice on re-doing their website. Since my advice is free, I don’t have to worry too much about it being good advice. But if I were doing this and didn’t have to answer to a committee (or Vishnu) I think I might go in this direction. (Nothing original here, BTW. Regular readers know who my influences are)

Don’t make people come to you (or your website). Take your information to where they are: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, etc.

I like posterous for feeding these social nodes. And it gives you a nice, clean, low-maintenance “place” to park your domain.

Big St. Louis architectural firm getting their blog on

Clyde found this blogging success story in the St. Louis Business Journal. It’s about HOK a global architectural firm with headquarters in St. Louis (I assume). It’s a biggie, with $752 million in revenue in 2008.

A year ago they launched a blog (HOKLife.com) to put a more human face on the firm, which has 2,000+ employees, and to communicate with potential hires, clients and competitors.

It’s a group blog with three dozen contributors from their offices around the world, whose posts, by the way, are not edited. Senior writer John Gilmore:

“Young readers are very savvy, and they know when something’s not authentic. If hour’s not authentic, it’s the kiss of death for a corporate blog.”

True that. The Business Journal article included some findings of a 2009 survey (of companies with more than 1,000 employees). Among the findings, companies with blogs reported higher levels of customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, greenness, revenue and market share.

The companies with blogs reported revenue per employee of $336,792, compared to $263,333 for those without blogs.

Despite success stories like this one, there remains –even in our company– pockets of resistance to blogging as a communications tool. And I’m convinced it comes down to control. Like HOK’s Gilmore said above, it’s got to be authentic and that means unfiltered and unedited. And that’s really difficult for managers who are centralized, command-and-control guys in their DNA.

If you have a subscription to the StL Biz Journal, you can read the full article here.

Tag cloud

We (yes, there IS a mouse in my pocket) migrated one of our websites over to WordPress this week. As near as we can determine, more than 46,000 stories were imported. My role in this has been modest but I did spend a good bit of time working with the categories, keywords, tags and other meta data used to organize all of those news and sports stories.

There are less than 5,000 posts to this blog but it would be impossible (okay, very difficult) to find anything without a good tagging scheme. One of the more common approaches to displaying those tags is the “tag cloud.” I have one on the right side of this page, near the bottom. And here’s the tag cloud for my flickr account.

tag-cloud-flickr

My friend Scott doesn’t like how tag clouds use different size text to indicate the most and least common topics. He thinks it looks “sloppy.” I find the visual cue very intuitive and easy to use. (I can see I have some clean-up to do)

Strangely, tagging is a bit like curling your tongue. Some people can do it and some just can’t. I’m getting better at it.

Honey, I’m home!

Yes, I am easily seduced. I admit it. I’m like a pillow, I keep the impression of the last person who sat on me. Twitter, Posterous… I love new stuff and tend to get carried away. I’ve posted her less frequently since I began dallying with these new tools. But, as Dave Winer reminds us (in a post to Robert Scoble regarding sale of FriendFeed to MySpace Facebook), I can always come home to momma.

“Our blogs are still there, as is the web and the Internet. They never went away just because we foolishly flirted with something fast and easy and seductive. Our blogs never went away, they’re still ready to share our ideas and connect us with others. We’ll go back to basics now, take what we learned from this round of innovation, and build it for real this time.”

I never got the FriendFeed bug but I can’t believe MySpace Facebook owning it is good news for users. But hey, if MS bought Yahoo! they’d probably screw up flickr, so…

The point is, my blog is mine. Nobody can buy it or mess with it. It’s my place to “write things down.”

The siren call of Posterous

http://ihnatko.posterous.com/damn-i-really-like-posterous-now-what
The siren call of Posterous
I continue to be enamored with Posterous, the bare-bones blog service to which you post via email. So much so, I’m moving one of my Typepad blogs over.
My friend Taisir doesn’t have time (on inclination) to post to a traditional blog. With Posterous and his iPhone, he can update the blog with minimal effort. And Posterous did a pretty good job importing the the 160+ posts I had on Typepad.
Like tech columnist Andy Ihnatko, I’m boiling down my online life to my WordPress blog, Twitter and –now– Posterous.

I continue to be enamored with of Posterous, the bare-bones blog service to which you post via email. So much so, I’m moving one of my Typepad blogs over.

My friend Taisir doesn’t have time (on inclination) to post to a traditional blog. With Posterous and his iPhone, he can update the blog with minimal effort. And Posterous did a pretty good job importing the the 160+ posts I had on Typepad.

Like tech columnist Andy Ihnatko, I’m boiling down my online life to my WordPress blog, Twitter and –now– Posterous.