Lifestreaming: Newspaper Uses Posterous to Solicit and Publish Reader Photos

You're probably sick of me talking about Posterous, but it's been about a year since I have been this excited by a new platform and its potential to change how we publish. I don't know what the future is for the company (and no, they aren't a client), but I love its simplicity, its hub and spoke model and its collaborative features. But don't just take my word for it. Check out how others are innovating.

John Bridges, a reporter with the Austin American Statesman, today is using Posterous to solicit and publish reader photos documenting a "day in the sun." Readers can submit their photos via email to post@austinheat.posterous.com and then approved images get added to an aggregate Posterous site you can find here. Brilliant.

I bet that others in the media will catch on soon and realize what you can do with this elegant, simple platform. We often overlook that the media helped Twitter go nuclear. Friendfeed was a bit to geeky to engender the same response, but Posterous I bet is simple enough that the media will start to put it to use in creative ways. This is the first example I have seen.

Quote: "In the future, everybody will be anonymous for 15 minutes."

During a recent interview with Personal Branding magazine, the writer asked me what I thought about this amusing quote, which is the inverse of Andy Wharhol's more famous one. I am not so sure. The world is filled with extroverts and introverts so maybe there's a balance somewhere. Your view? (I find it ironic by the way that this tweeter uses Obama on a stage as his Twitter background.)

Screencast: Google Reader Isn't Just for News, It's Also an Awesome Database

Think RSS is dead? Think it's too slow for the age of streams? Perhaps that's true for news. But have you ever considered using Google Reader as a private database? In this screencast I will show you how I do just that. This is why, for some like Marshall, RSS still remains essential.

Lifestreaming: Follow Your Posterous Peeps with RSS

As I mentioned last night, as more of my friends join Posterous and use it as a hub to populate their I am becoming a huge fan of their built in reader. It's helping me discover all kinds of new, substantive content that is hard to find in Twitter or even multiple blog RSS feeds. Today I found out you can actually subscribe to the Posterous peeps you follow via RSS. Here's how.

First, visit posterous.com/reader in your browser. If you're using Firefox, Safari or IE, the RSS icon should light up. Then all you need to do is subscribe to that feed. I am wondering if this one day will become my preferred input channel - especially if Posterous becomes as real-time as Friendfeed, Facebook and Twitter. It still feels slow right now, like blogging. Then again, much of the content already finds its way into all three sites. So this might be moot. Still, for now, it's cool for me.

Lifestreaming: Evolving the Model from Import and Aggregate to Hub and Spokes

Lifestreaming started out initially as a model that revolved around importation and aggregation: a place to roll-up all your streams. But that's changing.

Now that Facebook acquired Friendfeed and the noise on Twitter is at near cacophonous levels, I am seeing a new model emerge for lifestreaming. This one centers on using a site as your hub, having it syndicate out to all your spokes (where you engage around it) and then bringing some of the conversation back to your site. It also seems to help people focus their content in more useful ways.

Mark Krynsky, who I had a chance to meet in LA last week at XPrize, summarizes this shift for lifestreaming nicely in this post. Here's how he diagrammed it...

And this closely mirrors what others, like our creative director Jared Hendler, Fast Company and others have observed about Posterous.

Facebook, Twitter and RSS all have a big problem - too much noise, not enough signal. This new approach for lifestreaming, however, coupled with Posterous' outstanding reader (depicted below) is forcing me to make smart choices about who I follow. I am finding myself turning more to the Posterous community for cool stuff since, they too, seem to recognize that too much nose is bad, signal is good.

Maybe I am crazy, but I think the simplicity of the Posterous platform - which helps us get closer to signals and away from noise - will be the next site to capture the hearts and minds of the digerati, particularly as they tire of the noise.

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