Sharing photos on the Web

Dear PropellerHeads: I'd like to share my travel photos on the Internet, but using e-mail is about the extent of my technical prowess. What should I do?

A: Bamboozled by blogs? Flummoxed by Flickr? Then the Next Big Thing might be perfect for you. Mini-blogging lets you create your own personal blog - complete with photos, videos and links - without leaving the comfort of your e-mail software.

Older services, like Blogger (blogger.com) and WordPress (wordpress.com), popularized the personal Web log, or blog. Suddenly anyone could publish their thoughts on the Web without having to acquire programming skills - or writing skills, for that matter.

Later, MySpace (myspace.com) and Facebook (facebook.com) made it easier to share multimedia like photos, videos and audio files with friends and family. This was an improvement, but required some effort in maintaining your social network.

Twitter (twitter.com) next introduced micro-blogging, in which blog posts were limited to 140 characters. Twitter users follow other Twitter users in order to be notified when they post new tweets.

All of which brings us to mini-blogging, a.k.a. quick-blogging, light-blogging or short-form blogging. It's so new, there's no official name for it yet! Mini-blogging sites combine the best elements of their predecessors with some new tricks of their own.

Tumblr (tumblr.com) got it rolling in 2007, apparently during the great "e" shortage of that year. Their main innovation was the way they handled different types of content. Previous blog services were optimized for text-heavy posts, with a few links or images sprinkled in.

Tumblr made it easy to post just an image by itself, or just a quote or a link or a video. Tell Tumblr upfront what type of content you're posting, and it will provide only the fields that make sense in that context - like captions for images, or URLs for links. Each post is then formatted in a specific way based on the type of content. Check out Newsweek's "tumblelog" at newsweek.tumblr.com for an example.

Posterous (posterous.com) followed in 2008, improving on all those pre-posterous blogging services with its email-centric design. As their site puts it, "If you can e-mail, you can have your own website..." They're also clearly flaunting a surplus of vowels. Show-offs.

Create new posts on the site by e-mailing pictures (or videos, text, audio files, etc.) to post@posterous.com. This automatically creates a blog entry using the subject line of the e-mail as the blog post title, and the body of the e-mail as the content of the post.

To share images, simply attach them to an e-mail and Posterous will resize them and add them to your page (at the URL your-name.posterous.com). They're added to an image gallery, complete with links for downloading the full-size versions and for downloading the entire gallery as a single zip file. Attach videos to an e-mail, or send links to YouTube videos, and Posterous embeds a video player directly into your page for watching the file.

See posterous.com/faq for more, or rainn.posterous.com for Rainn Wilson's Posterous page (Dwight on The Office).

Competition between Tumblr and Posterous led to an explosion of features on both. They can auto-post your entries to other accounts, like your Facebook or Twitter page. Private posts are only visible to people who have a password you can assign. With the group blog feature, friends and family can post their own files to your page.

You can share content from any page on the Web by simply clicking a link in your browser's toolbar. Both sites can import existing content you have on older blogs, and they'll even create an iTunes-compatible podcast feed from the audio files you upload (or e-mail to them).

The mini-blogging trend has already spawned more sites, like Soup.io (http://soup.io) and Amplify (amplify.com), both newer but less popular than Tumblr and Posterous.

So the next time you find yourself puzzled by Picasa or flustered by Facebook, give one of these a try. We don't want a repeat of 2007, though, so pleas remmbr to consrv yur vowls.

When the PropellerHeads at Data Directions aren't busy with their IT projects, they love to answer questions on business or consumer technology. E-mail them to questions@askthepropellerheads.com or contact us at Data Directions Inc., 8510 Bell Creek Road, Mechanicsville, VA 23116. Visit our website at www.askthepropellerheads.com.