Jefferson City has four Rotary Clubs. Learfield Honcho Emeritus Clyde Lear belongs to the “Downtown Rotary Club” and he asked me to meet with a few of the members to explore the idea of a blog. We got together a couple of weeks ago at the Coffee Zone and after asking some questions, I suggested they start with Posterous.

Before I show you their progress, you have to see what they had before.

This really isn’t their fault. They had no way to update the site or improve it’s design. But they felt like they had lots of stuff they’d like to share with their members and the public. For those that haven’t seen my earlier posts on Posterous (as in ‘pre-posterous’), it’s a blogging platform or a “life-streaming” tool or both… but it doesn’t matter. The best part of Posterous is the ability to post by email. Photos, videos, audio, whatever.

In the screenshot below, they have photo and audio of a talk by MU Football Coach Gary Pinkel. Rotarian Jason Jett says he recorded the audio on his iPhone and just mailed it off to the new site. Simple as that.

While the Downtown Rotary Club tends to skew a little older than the other clubs, I’ll be very surprised if any of them one has a cooler, more content-rich site. Posterous is a great solution. Free, simple to use, and getting more features all the time.

Markus Mindaugas’ blog is called “living on impulse.” I’ve only been following for a couple of weeks but his posts are consistently positive and upbeat. Yesterday he invited readers to “steal this blog.” I hope he doesn’t mind if I share most of that post here:

Feel free to take, steal, re-purpose, or do anything you want with anything you find here (including my best photos). A link or reference would be be much appreciated, but is not required. I’m not worried about ownership. I’m not worried about losing anything. There’s nothing I can possibly lose by someone taking something I created and using it in any way they want to use it.

The only reason for me to copyright something would be for me to control it, a need to derive income from it, or a fear of misuse. I have no such fears. Besides, even “altruistic-licensing” can get really hairy and become a mess.

I am supremely confident in my own ability to create new stuff as needed. As soon as I write, photograph, or otherwise create something it’s already in the past. If anyone finds a use for it, fantastic. If it helps them out in ANY way, fantastic.

If someone wants to use something I created and finds it helpful and wants to share it – that’s awesome. It’s a compliment to me. I am in no way diminished by it, only enhanced. Besides, anything I create I will never “always have”. I will have to relinquish it, at the latest, when I die. So why obsess or hang on to it? It’s gone the minute I am done creating it. So I’ll let it fly.

While I have no illusions about the value of the ideas or images I post here at smays.com, I’d like to make the same offer. Take anything you want, use it anyway you like. I’ll make some more.

When I first encountered the concept of tagging, it seemed a little… obsessive? I’ve always been pretty good about organizing things into folders and the idea of “meta data” was mostly lost on me. In the last few years, however, I have become a believer. As good as search has become (on the desktop and in the cloud), there’s just too much stuff.

• smays.com – 4,707 posts
• flickr – 1,744 images
• iPhoto – 2, 670 images
• YouTube – 132 videos
• Posterous – 374 posts
• Twitter – 4,933 (no tags but you can star)

And that’s not much stuff compared to many others. Which brings me to mail. I use Apple Mail at work and here on the MacBook. Compared to Outlook, it’s very lean and basic. Has a notes and to-do feature (that I don’t use), but basically just does mail, with a spare, clean interface.

When it comes to email, there seems to be two schools of thought:

1. Save everything in one folder. Or, difficult as it is for me to believe, just leave everything in the in-box or the deleted folder. Our Help Desk guys tell me it’s not uncommon to find 20,000 emails in one of these folders. These are the keep-it-all-and-search folks.
2. Delete emails quickly or save in one of several folders. I fall into the latter group.

Where was I headed with all of this? Oh, tags.

I don’t have all that many emails but now that I have the tagging bug, I find myself wanting to tag my emails, so I’m trying out a little Apple Mail plug-in called MailTags. It’s not very pretty (which is unusual) but works pretty well. And it gives me the option of editing the subject line of an email. Don’t get me started on clueless subject lines.

If you’d like to know more about tagging, I recommend Everything is Miscellaneous, by Dr. David Weinberger.