I really liked posterous.com  It was a great way to create collaborative blogs and an easy way to get people contributing to a blog who didn’t like the idea that they were “blogging” but didn’t mind sending an e-mail or two.

I used it particularly pleasingly for a couple of applications: Most Interesting, which allows flickr users to submit their “most interesting” picture (as defined by flickr’s interestingness algorithm), together with a little commentary.  It flicked along for a little while with some lovely results.  I also liked using it for the feedback blogs for GovCamp for the last couple of years.  But if you’re having a look at those links in 2020, say, I don’t want you to just find a gravestone to posterous.

In all I’m associated with 22 blogs on there.  I’m now looking at how to move and re-host those that I started, either as part of my own site or on their own.  I think it’s my responsibility to make sure these things don’t end up disappearing just because I happened to choose a platform that later sold out to Twitter (and from there, who knows…?)

So what to do?  There’s a wordpress.com importer so I’m going to start by trying that.  That seems better to me than either waiting for posterous to come up with a solution or for me to fumble around with the API on my own.

In addition, I won’t be posting anything new to posterous, so there’s  a job to do of letting people know that’s the case and to watch out here instead.  At the same time it’s helping me to think about what I’m doing, what I’m writing and what the flows and sinks are that need to be cared for.

To me this is just part of picking up the pieces after a burst of innovation, we’ve learned a lot from using these tools, but we need to move on and build our own solutions when it’s clear that a service provider may not be as reliable as it once seemed.

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