I’ve been using posterous to throw thoughts into this blog for a while now. It’s a clever system that lets you publish to multiple places off the back of one email. I played with it some months ago, and walked away - then in a fit of laziness started using it again late last year. It seemed almost magical that I could send one email, and have my content automagically appear on WordPress, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Facebook, Blogger, Flickr, Delicious, and any number of other sites.
There are a few reasons I’m packing it in - most of them technical - but some of them practical too. Quite apart from it generating horrible markup from Google Mail, throwing the content I generate out across multiple platforms is diluting my readership. I realised while reading one of Guy Kawasaki’s “Holy Kaw” posts yesterday how annoying it is that he forces readers through several portal pages before you reach content. I didn’t like it at all, and then realised that it’s exactly what I’ve been doing.
If you had happened upon one of my blog posts on Facebook, the link would have taken you to posterous, not WordPress. That was pretty stupid of me. I’m not trying to track readers, but I would like to think people can find their way back to me if they liked something I wrote - if my writing is appearing all over the place, then it’s difficult for them to do that.
I seem to have created accounts everywhere, and now I’m not sure what I might do with them. I’ll probably kill off posterous entirely. I’ll keep Tumblr because the community is fantastic, and I’ll keep LiveJournal for the same reason.
I’m good at causing chaos, aren’t I…