Luca Belletti’s Lifestream

I have been keeping a blog of some sort since early 2001. Over the last two years I blogged less and less, but used a number of other sites more to post photos, links, short updates, and to develop conversations arous them.

At the same time, I also kept looking for ways to get all this content together in one location. I tried a few Wordpress lifestreaming plugins, and connected all my activities at Friendfeed. I also funneled everything through to Facebook, which to date is the location where my content gets most comments. Sometimes I connected sites together so that the content would propagate without me having to do much.

All of this was starting to get a bit too complicated, so when Steve Rubel switched his blog to Posterous I was inspired to do the same. Posterous lets you update many sites at once via email. You tell it which sites to update, and Posterous choses which ones according to the type of content attached to the email.

I am experimenting now; I want to see how Posterous handles multiple sites and have connected everything to it. If you are thinking of doing the same, please continue reading.

I have just emailed the following:

• To: post@posterous.com (the email address that posts to all sites)
• Subject: The world through a sink drain thingy
• Body: A rubbish picture to test a new photo posting workflow via Posterous.

Attachment: a photo (3264x2448)

And Posterous updated:

• Twitter with email subject and a shortened URL to the post on Posterous
• Facebook with email subject and body, no picture but a link to the post on Posterous. Note that this is an entry on the wall, not as a status update
• Friendfeed with email subject, full URL of the post on Posterous, and no email body but the picture
• Jaiku same as Twitter
• Picasa with the photo in a Posterous Photos album, no subject nor body from the email, no link to the post on Posterous
• Flickr with the email subject, the photo with the original size, a link to the post on Posterous
• Vimeo was not updated (I trust it would if the attachment was a video)
• YouTube was not updated (I trust it would if the attachment was a video)
• Tumblr with the photo, email subject and body, and a link to the post on Posterous
• Delicious with the post on Posterous saved as a new bookmark, with email subject as header and body as text.
• My blog with the email subject as post title, the body as an entry, and the photo, and a link to the post on Posterous.

This is helping me see that it works very well almost everywhere, but I might remove the autoposting to Delicious. Also, I will need to remove all the links between various services and FriendFeed, as it can now ingest everything from Posterous instead.

The big winner for me is the possibility to post from Gmail. If you do, check out the Zemantabookmarklet that provides the usual tagging/linking/image functionalities from within Gmail. Mindblowing.

Right now I'm keeping both my usual Wordpress blog at bitful (but updating it purely from Posterous) and my Posterous lifestream (which I have redirected to my own unused domain. Will I dare let go of the last bit of control over my content (my Wordpress database) and put everything in the cloud? I'll see how it goes and the I'll tell you. For now, it looks like it is simpler, and I like that very very much.

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