Observations on 17 months of Dadamac's posterous September 4, 2011

Dadamac's posterous is where I post a sample of things that have caught my attention, plus occasional things I've written, especially open letters and comments I've written elsewhere in response to other people's blogs. This month I haven't been using it as much as previously. I realise that I feel I'll probably use it less in the future than I have done in the past - so I'm considering why.

Learning by doing

Like everything else that I do, using posterous is part of my "learning by doing" on the Internet. Much of my learning relates to things that could not happen without the Internet (self-directed learning that has nothing to do with set courses, types of online-collaboration, online-communities, and various other aspects of life and learning happening now). I started to experiment with posterous nearly a year and a half ago - March 22, 2010  Dadamac exploring posterous - http://dadamac.posterous.com/dadamac-exploring-posterous.

Show and tell

I like the ease of use of Posterous. I discovered that it offered an comparatively trouble-free way to develop an archive of what I'm doing, in London and online, related is some way or another to what I do in Dadamac. I wanted some way to share varied interests - things that would put our UK-Nigeria work in a wider context of theory and of practice. Dadamac's posterous has given me a way to offer an "over my shoulder" sample of what I'm doing, thinking and learning - a kind of quick "show and tell" from "Dadamac beyond Nigeria" - without needing to explain how it all fits together.

Posterous and open letters

I still think that it's a good idea to be as open as possible - but it does take extra time to write letters as open letters instead of just writing to the person concerned. I hoped that posting emails to postersous would be a time-effective way of sharing ideas and initiatives from an early stage. It worked in some ways - but takes more time that I can really afford. I may still do it now and again, but I think in future I'll probably wait until things have moved on. When I need to write an overview I'll do a dadamac.net blog about it, or post something on posterous. In addition I could set up an "initiatives" entry at dadamac.net - something that wasn't really an option when I started dadamac's posterous.

Sharing web-links

I've also liked posting web-links to posterous. I've used delicious toofor keeping track of weblinks but, for various idiosyncratic reasons, I liked putting the links here on dadamac's posterous too. However, I've learned that it is "bad practice" to simply refer to a website that has caught my eye, without adding anything to the original. The reason this is "bad practice" is because what I post here gets re-posted on twitter and it's been pointed out to me that a twitter link should refer directly to the original site - not go via some site of mine. I can see the sense of that - so I'd better stop doing it. I'll experiment with putting some links at a different posterous site - one that doesn't get tweeted. I set it up today - Dadamac and patterns of change - http://dadamac-and-change.posterous.com/patterns-of-change-why-this-posterous

What I love about posterous is its ease of use

As far as I'm concerned there is nothing to beat the ease of use of email. The fact that I can just write an email, send it to posterous (and copy to anyone else that I want to) in the usual email way is a huge bonus. I expect I'll continue to use dadamac's posterous, but not as much as I have done. The experiment is nearing its natural end. Fewer posts and a round up only once a month seems likely in future.