BryanSays.com

Posterous wants to be like Tumblr with Post.ly

// January 21st, 2010 // View Comments // Internet, Social Media

Posterous has done a relaunch of their URL Shortening site Post.ly. This site was used previously to shorten URLs from your posterous blog before sending to Twitter. Going to http://post.ly did not have this slick interface in the past. Now you can interact with the site directly as a quick and easy way to post to Posterous and Twitter.

This new simplified site’s look is a complete 180 from the normal posterous site seen below:

This may be an answer to the simple look and feel of Tumblr, posterous’s direct competitor. Is this article written by Peg on Tech, one of the reasons for Tumblr’s popularity is the landing page is much less cluttered. Here is a quote from the article about Tumblr’s landing page:

Sign up is dead simple. Can you imagine the conversion rates they get out of that page? Moreover, they have one of the best taglines of any service: the easiest way to blog. What else is there to explain? They don’t brag about features like “like”, “reblog” or (ugh) “tumblarity.” Tumblr is the easiest way to blog. Anyone, your mother included, can understand that.

Posterous with their new Post.ly page is trying to bring that simplicity to them as well. Techcrunch has an article on the announcement. I personally have a tumblr and posterous account. I seem to use posterous more because I like their feature set. I will definitely give this a try and see if I like it better than using their main site.

First Guest Podcast

// January 16th, 2010 // View Comments // Internet, Social Media

Did my first guest podcast, well actually my first podcast of any kind. The podcast was the Average Joe Show, hosted by Corey Charette and Ward Miller. It was a pretty entertaining show. In this episode we discussed the following news stories: sickness from BBQs, toy gun store robbery, long hair suspension, Army mom refuses to go, McGwire used steroids, Spider-Man 4 is a no go, and a sex robot. Ya we covered a varied array of topics. Give it a listen here.

Thanks again Corey and Ward for the opportunity and I hope to be on more shows in the future.

Leo Laporte Documentary

// January 6th, 2010 // View Comments // Internet, Social Media, Video

This documentary was featured on the Inside TWIT blog but I had to share it with my friends and readers as well. If you don’t know who Leo Laporte is, you can’t call yourself a Technology geek. No biggie, thats what wikipedia is for. Leo runs a very successful podcasting network known as TWIT (This week in Tech) but he prefers to call them netcasts. Leo says,

“I’ve never liked the word podcast. It causes confusion…people have told me that they can’t listen to my shows because they ‘don’t own an iPod’.”

Speaking of netcasts, that is his tagline on the bumpers to his shows “Netcasts you love, from people you trust.”

The documentary below is done by Michael Sean Wright and Marc Ostrick where they traveled to the “TWIT cottage” in Petuluma, CA. This is part of The Spark Series for eGuiders. They are exploring what makes Leo stand out in this new frontier of media. Leo Laporte has a huge following on the internet and he is doing this with a small staff and a modest budget compared to his TechTV days where it used to cost millions to do what he’s doing today. Leo also give his take on technology in general, Net Neutrality, and explains the joys of doing his show now versus what he did with traditional media. You will also get a small look behind the scenes of TWIT is run. I have always been a huge fan of Leo and the ex-TechTV personalities. A great little film about a tech culture icon.

U2 and YouTube Live

// October 26th, 2009 // View Comments // Blog, Music, Social Media, Video

Last night U2 broadcasted their concert at the Rose Bowl via YouTube. It was a huge event and pretty impressive show. The video quality was surprisingly good for a webcast. It seemed to be a space themed concert with an a little David Bowe “Ground control to Major Tom” to start off the show. They even had a moment where an interview played from one of the astronauts from the International Space Station played over their “Bubble Screen.”

This is yet another example of a musical group embracing technology and its many advantages to reach a huge audience. Millions of fans were able to access U2 from across the globe for FREE! You were able to experience one of your favorite bands from the comfort of your home and planted to seed for new fans in the process.

Besides just YouTube, they used the power of social media to get the word out with the help of twitter and facebook. Their page contained “crawlers” similar to other sites like ustream where people could tweet straight from the YouTube page about the show bringing in a global audience. I know this because I watched this twitter crawler go across the screen as I watched and noticed people from Israel, Japan, Mexico, Philippines etc posting in.

It was a great concert. Alot of the favorites were played along with songs from the new album. Don’t worry if you missed the live broadcast I’m sure it will be rebroadcast at least another day. I can’t wait to hear the stats on how many people were reached worldwide when YouTube stops the rebroadcast and we tally all of the status updates from Twitter and Facebook. I’m sure some records were broken last night.

U2 is already a huge worldwide band but they maintained or increased their elite status. I hope that more artists follow this path of broadcasting live for free like this. It won’t replace the act of really being at the concert but its a great complement and a good way to build followers and increase music sales.

Below are more pics and screen captures from the YouTube stream:

Post Events Free Online

// September 4th, 2009 // View Comments // Internet, Social Media

This blog post is based on a project I did for a local museum to help them promote some of their upcoming events for free. The examples in this post will be based on their events. The five websites I will be reviewing are craigslist, upcoming.org, eventful, zvents and facebook. I will outline the pros and cons of each service as well as what sets them apart. Keep reading to see the reviews.
(more…)

Lazy Feed Preview

// August 18th, 2009 // View Comments // Internet, Social Media

Lazy Feed is a new web app still in  ”invite-only beta” that basically aggregates feeds and stories based on trending keywords and topics that you add yourself. I was lucky enough to score an invite code from Louis Gray in a friendfeed conversation. Not sure what topics to add?  Don’t worry the site can connect to some of your social sites to grab your most popular keywords and tags as a base. They currently support 4 social sites: twitter, flickr, delicious, and blogs. Once all of your topics are imported from these sites, you can manually add your own topics as well.

The wow factor with Lazyfeed is the real-time aspect of the site. Once you have added all of your favorite keywords, you will see the topics move up and down the page depending on which topic is receiving updates. Once you select a topic from the left hand column, you can view the results in the middle, browsing column. The newest content will always be at the top. The content will be summaries of each story and you can click on each to get an expanded view. You can even click the Save button to save the article for later viewing.

This service seems to take its cues from sites like google reader but it also tries to set itself apart by being based on topics rather than individual RSS feeds. The site is still in beta with more features in the works, I’m sure. I like the simplicity of the site and how the newest content gets pushed to the top. The real-time updates can be paused if you rather take your time when reading the stories. I would like to see options to share the content with other services. Right now its more of a closed system.

Below is a video which shows a demo of the site’s features:

If you’re interested in trying out the service let me know and I have 2 invite codes to the site. Fare warning about these codes, they are not guaranteed to work. I took them from a public spreadsheet so no guarantees.