Sharing the Addiction

I have come across two very interesting web 2.0 tools in the last couple of weeks that could make blogging more attractive to both teachers writing blogs and to the community who read blogs.

Posterous – using email to write blogs

This is an extremely simple concept. Anyone can get a blog going by sending an email to post@posterous.com. This email is converted into a blog post on a site that is automatically setup for your email address. Every time you send another email from the same email address it will be converted and added to this website as the latest post. Even better is the fact that if you send photo, mp3 or file attachments, these will be automatically added in a very web-friendly format for people to view or listen to online. I tried it out and the results of this can be seen at http://suzie_ogyqs.posterous.com/ You will notice that the name of my site is not that userfriendly. If I had set up an account BEFORE sending in my first email, I could have chosen the part of the URL that goes before posterous.com. As it is, the first time I logged into Posterous after sending my first email, it gave me the chance to choose my own URL so you will see when you click on the link above, it redirects to suzievesper.posterous.com.

Nourish – subscribing to blogs via email

Many of the parent communities we work with are not all that familiar with technologies such as RSS. However, most people have email and will check this regularly. Nourish allows you to turn a feed (or a combination of feeds) into something that people can subscribe to by email. You can add a button to your website where people can click on and add their email addresses into to subscribe. You can also add addresses in yourself so that those people will get the email newsletter. People will be able to unsubscribe by clicking a link in their email if they don’t want to receive these emails. This would also be great for someone who wants to keep check on the activity happening in online spaces such as a school ICT lead teacher or a principal. They could combine all the feeds from the teacher blogs/ wikis and have these being sent as a digest to their email. I am going to add a button for people to subscribe to this blog very shortly!

Tags: Blogs, email, nourish, posterous