When I’m away from home, I like to write a travel journal. However, they tend to get stuffed into a drawer when I get back and I’d like to be able to merge what I’ve written with the photos I’ve taken. Obvious answer then – put it in a blog.
Thing is – I’m on holiday. I don’t really want to be spending a lot of time each day writing up what I’ve done and the last thing I want to happen is reporting the experience to get in the way of actually having the experience. I’d prefer to put longer posts together after I get back to the UK to give me the time to write something more considered (and fully illustrated), without breaking into my time away.
What I’ll be doing during my (very shortly) impending trip to south west USA is updating my Posterous photoblog from my iPhone. Posterous is brilliant and perfectly suited to this kind of task as (1) updates are made by email and (2) everything happens automatically.
So, for instance – I’m on the road in Arizona and come across the Daily Pie Cafe in Pie Town (seriously, it exists). Perfect photo material so I get out my iPhone, take a photo of whichever pie I’m eating and email it to my Posterous account, along with some content explaining where I am and what is going on. I’ll have turned my data connection off due to stupidly expensive roaming data rates so the email will go into the send queue. As soon as a I get to a wireless access point it sends and a new post is added.
Posterous then autoposts the photo to my Flickr account, Facebook account and onto Twitter with a link back to the blog post, so all my friends and followers can find out what I’m up to.
I’m still very impressed by this (thanks to Phill Howson for telling me about it). It seems perfectly suited to travel and is both simple and clever. It also lets my friends get in touch with me easily, though loads of channels (either direct on the blog or on Twitter, Facebook, email). It’s good to be reminded of what an amazingly connected world we now live in, able to share experiences instantaneously from one side of the world to another (and using a device that’s smaller than my wallet and has more computing power than a three year old laptop). Who needs science fiction?
