140Char

I’m really intrigued to find out what other people are using Posterous for. The ease with which you can post by email, and send images and video which are automatically resized means I keep toying with it for various things but haven’t found something which has got me using in regularly (I’ve already got two self-hosted Wordpress blogs including this one, and a pretty active Twitter account etc).

I know that Steve Rubel is using it as his main place to post in a lifestreaming style.

And the Austin American Stateman newspaper used it to crowdsource images from readers.

Plus more visually-creative people seem to be embracing it – e.g. Christian Payne.

But I need more inspiration – are you using Posterous, and if so, how are you using it? Alternatively have you seen particularly good or bad examples of people using it for a specific purpose or reason?

I’m determined to get back into covering non-Twitter news, so here’s the latest on Posterous, which now lets anyone customise their microblog/lifestreaming/’blogging lite’ site with themes or custom HTML and CSS.

Until now it’s been one of the big differences between it and rival Tumblr – hence why Posterous also allows you to drag and drop your Tumblr theme into Posterous. This will make it easier for anyone considering the switch.

Personally I definitely prefer using Posterous due to the ease with which I can upload everything I want via email – and I already use it to autopost to Tumblr.

Here’s the handy site guide to themes:

The one thing I haven’t seen tried anywhere else, and that I’m keen to experiment with, is whether using custom HTML will allow advertising into the platform – it isn’t something I’d stumbled across on any Tumblr/Posterous sites yet, and given that it’s about the only reason I can find for picking Google’s Blogger over Wordpress as a hosted service, it could be a major feature for either of the two lifestreaming sites.

Here’s an interesting guide to live twitting from events – guest posted by Julius Solaris, blogger and event planner extraordinaire.
On the 29th of November 2008, I’ll be involved in ecoCampLondon a BarCamp about the environment and sustainability. The aim of the camp is to produce a document with all the discussion of the sessions. For the previous edition we just gave out a template which the session promoter needed to fill in. Boring and time consuming.
We felt that this solution was a bit 1999, so we decided to look at new ways to collect discussions. And here it goes: LiveTwitting

How does it work?
- Every attendee needs to follow either @livetwitting or @livet

- There are very simple commands to learn

- You can manage all the sessions talks on the LiveTwitting website.

BarCamps are a fork of Open Space Technology. The aim of these unconferences is to produce something in a team effort rather than just loosing all that precious interaction among attendees. When the method was elaborated it was the mainframe era and static websites were common. With Web 2.0 things change.
Twitter allows to capture conversations in a great unbiased manner and therefore should be used for most if not all conferences, tradeshows and events in general. The 140chars nature of the service pushes attendees to actually summarize what is going on and synthesize the content in a great way.
Making your event more compliant with new technologies is the way to go and you may be missing out on precious feedback and content if you fail to do so.