One of the things I love about the internet most is the fact that it puts the power to publish into the hands of pretty much anybody. There are many ways of doing it these days, whether by using a tool like WordPress like I do here – which can be pretty complicated – or perhaps by using Medium, which continues to interest and confuse me in equal measure.
So I was quite excited to come across a really simple thing called publishthis.email which allows anyone to create public webpages by just sending an email.
I immediately got in touch with my friend Lloyd about this, knowing that he shares my enthusiasm for publishing stuff, and also how he really enjoyed using Posterous which did something similar, albeit in a slightly more complicated fashion. Posterous was bought and shut down by Twitter a few years ago.
publishthis.email works in a ridiculously simple fashion. All you do is send an email to page@publishthis.email and a web page is created for you – the link to which sent by return to you. Any formatting in your email is preserved and any pictures you include are uploaded and added to your page.
Here’s my rather boring first effort at a page. Lloyd’s is a little more exciting.
And… that’s it. There’s nothing more to it and it really is that simple. Oh, except for collections. When you send your email, if you add a + and the name of a collection (basically a group of pages) after page and before the @ in the email address (so, for example, send to page+davescollection@publishthis.email) a dynamic list of those pages is then created, with its own URL, giving you a very rudimentary blog.
Here’s my rather boring first effort at a collection.
There’s loads missing, like human readable URLs, navigation links between pages and so forth. However, whether they come or not, publishthis.email is potentially really interesting as a way of very quickly getting text and images onto the web to share with others.
It’d be good to hear what folk think about tools like this, and what uses they could be put to.
I’ve never really got my head around Medium. Yes, I follow many of the posts there, but why would anyone want to transfer the rights to their content (and with it, their IPR) to a third party platform? I’ll admit I have posted some stuff to LinkedIn, but only as copies of original content I’ve previously posted to my own blog. Brands and content are precious commodities these days, so if you care about what you write, I would strongly advocate having your own blog, and put the effort into bringing people to it, through social media, email subscription or good ol’ RSS (I still love RSS). IMHO, disseminating your precious content through other other people’s brands is not a good idea.