The Single-Use Blog


Kodak FunTime Disposable 35mm Camera

My friend Jeff likes to travel, and to some pretty crazy places. A couple of months ago, he visited St. Vincent and the Grenadines (a small island nation southeast of Puerto Rico). More recently, he was in Europe touring the sites of major World War II battles. For each of these trips, he did something that I thought was pretty creative: he started a small, dedicated Posterous blog - or “single-use blogs”, as I’ve come to call them. I’d like to explore this concept a bit.

Whenever I hear about somebody starting a new blog, it’s generally an endeavor which the blogger intends to maintain perpetually. Perhaps they pore over a topic, audience and look and feel before writing a few posts, emailing all of their friends about the new blog and waiting for the traffic to roll in. Others might visit Posterous, Tumblr or WordPress and have a functional blog a few minutes after they had the idea they should start one. Regardless how these blogs came to be, they typically aren’t designed to be temporary. Thing is, a simple blog is a really awesome way to record something like a vacation: you’re going to be posting photos with descriptions, perhaps some video and a few snippets of text here and there to give a little commentary on the trip itself. Ingenious.

In my mind, this is another brilliant use of Posterous. Once you set up your account, you can create as many blogs as you want and it takes like 20 seconds to add another one. You just create the new blog before you leave, grab the email address you’ll use to add content to it and get your ass on a plane for whatever tropical paradise awaits you. Let’s not forget how cool it’d be to have a place where friends and family could get trip updates right after you post them instead of having to congregate for a slide show or something after the travelers return. And whenever anybody asks how the trip went or what you saw, you can shoot over a URL and be done with it instead of telling that embarrassing coconut story again.

Thinking about this for more than a couple of minutes will reveal that these new, friction-free types of blogs would be a great way to track all sorts of events, not just vacations. Imagine if, at the kick-off of the next conference you attended, everybody was given an email address where they could email photos or video they’d shot, a few paragraphs in response to a talk they heard, pretty much anything related to the event. You’d have a ready-made conference scrapbook with comments and an RSS feed. And there’d be no reason to ever take it down; for as long as the blog provider stayed in business, past attendees could refer back to the event blog for information about a particular workshop or speaker, or just to remember how great a time it was.

Anyway, I thought this was a really kick-ass idea. Check out Jeff’s blog about St. Vincent and the Grenadines and his blog covering his Tour of World War II Battle Sites.

Photo by Capt Kodak

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