Archive for August, 2008

For those of you who’d like to try blogging but feel a bit intimidated, there’s a new platform that makes it very easy to start your own blog. If you know how to send an email, you can blog. That’s the premise of posterous.com. You don’t have to sign up or go through any complicated setup steps - all you have to do to start blogging is to send them an email at post@posterous.com and they’ll reply giving you your own site at http://yourname.posterous.com. Once you receive their welcome email, you’ll be taken through a simple process to allocate a password so you can access the control panel to your site.

You can email photos, videos, MP3s audio files and other files such as Word documents, Powerpoint presentations and pdfs and they will be instantly uploaded as a blog post. The text of your email will become the text of the blog post. If you are in the US, you can even blog by SMS by authorizing your phone once you’ve got yourself a posterous blog.

Posterous can also automatically cross-post whatever you email to your other sites such as Twitter, Flickr and the major blog platforms such as Wordpress and Blogger as well as self-hosted blog sites. Also the audio feed is an iTunes-ready podcast feed so people can subscribe to your audio content via iTunes without your having to do anything more.

In the interests of simplicity, Posterous does not offer options to add widgets to your sidebar and there are no tools such as Categories or a Blogroll that you would normally expect to see on most blogs. For most people who just want to post items by email as and when they feel like it and wherever they may be, that simplified interface means there is less to think about - all you have to do is send an email and voila, you’re blogging.

You also cannot customise the design or layout of your site but then, again, the focus is on simplicity. So while Posterous may not be right for people who want the full blog experience with the ability to have a customized design, widgetized sidebars and all the usual elements such as Categories etc that help your visitors navigate around your blog, it’s a great starting point for people who are happy with the simple, streamlined way to post their content online.

For those of us who already have blogs, Posterous can be a fun supplemental tool - if you set up the automatic cross-posting function, you can blog by email via Posterous. It also means that your content is available on another platform and this can be helpful for making it more widely available to a different audience. Via your Posterous control panel, you can subscribe to follow other people’s posterouses (posteri?) and vice versa so it’s a great way to explore other multi-media posterous bloggers.

I’ve been using Utterz.com for my multi-media blogging but I will try Posterous. I like Utterz because it gives you the option of blogging by phone - ie you just dial a number from your mobile or a landline and speak, then press a couple of buttons on the phone and you have an audio-blog which is automatically cross-posted to your blog(s). I may still use Utterz for that. But from what I can see, Posterous has the advantage on other points in that the video player looks bigger and cleaner and for text posting there is no text character limit, compared to Utterz.

You don’t have to be glued to the telly this summer to follow the Olympics. You can watch it online from your desk at work or on your mobile phone anywhere you can access the mobile internet. According to Fierce Mobile Content, an up to the minute study by NBC Universal reports that, “74.6 million viewers tuned in for Friday’s Opening Ceremonies–while television accounted for 94 percent of the audience, online viewing represented 5.7 percent, mobile TV accounted for 0.03 percent and only about 36,000 viewers (0 percent) watched via video-on-demand.”

This is likely to be the first time that many people are using their mobiles to watch TV, according to the report, and no doubt a lot more people are watching online who cannot get to a TV. So the increased viewer numbers overall is good news for the US TV channel NBC as they are one of the key US broadcasters offering live coverage of the Olympics online and via mobile - once people get the hang of using new technology and get used to having that universal access, they are likely to want more. Increased access to content via a variety of media means, of course, increased viewer numbers overall and that’s good for advertising revenue - and may even translate into people willing to pay in the future for the convenience of, say, mobile content delivery.

The NBC online site offers viewers the option to be alerted when an event starts as well as “video to go” if you missed it. There are also downloads of highlights, results and medals listings, information about competing countries and online games to play. And, evidence of the growing Hispanic demographic in the US, a Spanish version of the site.

In the UK, the BBC also offers live video coverage of the Olympics online with a live text commentary. You can receive video masterclasses on your mobile phone - eg explaining the art of tae kwan do - and also take part in a live streaming discussion via text (Text 81111 with “OLYMPICS” as first word - UK users only). You can also receive text alerts for the events you want to watch live. For the mobile site, type http://news.bbc.co.uk/mobile/ into your phone’s browser. Like the NBC site, there are medal and results listings. There is also a section featuring BBC Sport’s Olympics Monkey - a cartoon mascot of sorts derived from the Chinese mythic hero Monkey - with games and quizes.

In fact, checking out the BBC mobile page opened up to me a whole world of mobile BBC content beyond the Olympics - including previews of the thriller series Spooks, text recipes from a cookery programme and the chance to share your snapshot of a newsworthy event direct from your mobile phone.

In China, too, mobile coverage of the Olympics is ubiquitous, according to Reuters. The report quotes Yun Weijie, president and chief executive of Telegent Systems, a Silicon Valley semiconductor maker: “TV will become a standard feature for cellphones in China by the end of this year, just like cameras.”

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