Review of Tony Vincent's Dead Simple Blogs and Podcasts Using Posterous

After a very disappointing year of clinics last year, I wasn't sure what to expect for me first clinic this year. Since I plan on starting a regular Podcast about Technology in the Schools, I thought this might be a useful clinic and I might get a couple of tips or good ideas to make that easier. I got a ton of great ideas!

First of all, he introduced the audience to Posterous. On first glance, it looks like just another free blog site and maybe not even as good as Blogger or Wordpress. Since I have used Posterous for about a year, I knew that it was much more powerful but I had no idea how powerful. There two big advantages for Posterous. First is the ability to submit posts by simply sending an email to an address so many people can contribute and also that it will post to other sites like Twitter and Facebook. If you are trying to target a wider audience, this is definitely a plus. Second is the ease at which you can incorporate other media into your posts. Simply attach a picture, video, pdf, or sound file from your phone, iPad, computer, etc. and Posterous formats it and creates a player for it in the post. As he states, "Blogging and podcasting should not be about the act of putting something online; it should be about Communication." This makes it about as simple as it can get. If publishing is as easy as sending an email, anyone can do that.

As the handout says, you can have multiple sites under your on account. For this site, I just added another under the spaces option. Each site will have a different email address to use to submit so you just have to remember where to send it and Posterous will do the rest. If you would like to try posting to my site, send an email to bhaynes-test-podcast@posterous.com and it will be added. Since you might not want just anyone posting to your site, it will notify the owner that someone has posted and will wait until you confirm and accept it.

Decide to make this a true Podcast, there are some simple instruction to get your podcasts into iTunes for you and your viewers. You can just follow the instruction at the end of his handout and take it from there. In the class he also showed the process of getting listed in iTunes.

Overall, this session was a huge hit and many other people said they really enjoyed it. Now I don't have any more excuses to not do the podcast I've been trying to get going. Please let me know you are interested in finding out more about this site and/or this clinic.

bhaynes