BBC Backstage’s Ian Forrester has been blogging about the attention that Twitter has been getting from the BBC and some experiments they’ve done with using the open source microblogging platform Laconi.ca:

“I think as the BBC gets its heads around microblogging it will quickly notice that not only is it somewhat promoting a single startup through its wording but that Microblogging is much bigger and like how we don’t host our blogs on wordpress.com, we will want to host it ourselves. There’s all type of things we could do with our microblogging system, things which are forbidden on Twitter or even not possible because of the way Twitter is setup. The obvious example is a children’s microblogging service. This will resolve its self and it will be the geeks who had a hand in the new bright future of the BBC.”

This is a typically difficult – and foggy – area for the BBC. On the one hand is the recurring paranoia of being seen to unduly influence the market; on the other, there is the concern of spending public funds on adapting an open source platform like Jaiku for something that no one will likely use because everyone is already somewhere else: Twitter.

Ultimately it comes down to which road gets the core job done best, and that’s clearly the Twitter route.

In some ways it reflects a general perception of Twitter being a publishing medium – when it is more about communication. Imagine the BBC not using telephones for fear they were artificially inflating the value of telephone companies.

But a key problem is that Twitter has no business model yet, which makes it unpredictable – a fact that became particularly apparent when many publishers had the rug pulled from under their feet when Twitter withdrew SMS updates overnight. By making users increasingly dependent on the service Twitter gain power and it’s harder for news organisations to make concrete plans.

There’s another side to this: in the next few years the likes of Open Social and other Identity 2.0 technologies are likely to make it easier for users to export their identities across services – meaning you don’t need to re-invite all your friends/followers. In other words, that power of Twitter is significantly lessened.

But not so much that a BBC microblogging service makes any sense whatsoever if it can be done more effectively with Twitter.

And if it can’t be done with Twitter, there are dozens of startups who could probably do it better as part of a partnership (perhaps through Backstage itself), than the BBC could alone.

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Assuming you want them to, how do you get people to blog? It’s a challenge facing most community editors, particularly as they seek to encourage a conversation with readers for whom WordPress or Blogger are still too fiddly.

Enter Posterous, a fantastically intuitive, quick and easy blogging platform. Scrapping the need for registration, or even the need to go onto the web, this has the potential to be a mass blogging tool – as well as a great tool for blogging on the move.

To start a blog all a user has to do is send an email to post@posterous.com.

That’s it.

A blog is created for them with their email as the first post (the subject line is the title).

It gets better: if you email photos, video or audio it is automatically embedded in a Flash player. Link to a YouTube, Google Video, Justin.TV, Vimeo or Omnisio video and it’s automatically embedded as well. Send more than one image and a gallery is created. PDFs, PowerPoint and Word documents are also embedded using previous SFTW Scribd.

As for the conversation? You can have comments emailed to you, and can reply by simply responding back to the email. And the site has social networking functions, with user profiles and the ability to follow other users if you register.

TechCrunch also reports that “new features will be launched over the summer, says co-founder Sachin Agarwal, including customized CSS and the ability to cross post to other blogging platforms.” This last piece may well persuade me to move off WordPress. It’s that good.

As for its business model: ReadWriteWeb says the site was founded with “about $15,000 in seed capital. Posterous is currently free and plans to start selling premium features in the future.”

The one downside is a potential vulnerability to fake posting by people using masked email addresses, although they would have to know what the address was first (I’m using a bespoke email address for mine).

Here are just some implications that spring to mind:

• if you meet someone you think would be a great blogger, just ask them to send an email to that address, and forward the reply (which tells you what your blog address is).
• If they have a document you’d like to put online, do the same (in other words, easy webpage creation rather than blog creation)
• There is massive potential for blogging on the move – particularly the ability to email replies to comments.
• This also makes group blogging much easier, as you simply have to register all contributors’ email addresses.
• For example: record a phonecall interview on your N95, then email it to the blog.
• You could set up an email feed from another blog using Feedburner or xFruits to cross-post into Posterous
• Or simply forward emails, e.g. press releases, email interviews, that you want your readers to see verbatim.

And I’m sure there are plenty of other possibilities – let me know your ideas.

Read more ‘Something for the weekend’ posts

UPDATE: Jon Hickman has been putting it through its paces and has a list of pros and cons:

1. It doesn’t create a hyperlink in my bio where I have placed a URL

2. It doesn’t pull in feeds or sets from flickr intelligently, and create a gallery

3. Creating a gallery via email is difficult because it will be limited by how many pictures you can fit through your mail server in one go

4. Why doesn’t it even pull in individual flickr images when I post it a URL (it does this with YouTube after all).  The only way to do it is to get a link that resolves .jpg, ie click onto the image page and extract the link from the options at the bottom

5. once I have made a gallery I can’t change the pictures

6. where’s the themes????

good things;

1. easy

2. multiple email addresses support

3. rss feed – so might be useful to aggregate content that is emailable and pull into other things (like the project I’m doing with Jezz…)

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Amy Gahran is learning about microblogging the Total Community Coverage in Cyberspace (some interesting reflections – well worth reading), which gave me a perfect reminder to finally publish a post I wrote in draft form a month or so back. So, for what it’s worth, here are three lessons I’ve learned about Twittering:

1. Keep to a niche. If blogs are about niches, microblogging is about microniches. If you’re expecting people to put up with constant updates it’s got to be very specific. So, think Madeleine McCann, not ‘news headlines‘.
2. Link to mobile-friendly pages if you can. When I get my Twitter updates from Press Gazette on my mobile phone and ‘click’ on the link, I get a very large designed-for-the-monitor page that I have to scroll down and across to read. I long ago stopped clicking on those links. If you’re giving tasters of your stories to people who may be viewing on their phones, you’re going to frustrate them if the full linked-to versions don’t use liquid designs or mobile stylesheets.
3. Be part of the conversation. Martin Stabe has 114 followers; the publication he writes for has 66. Maybe it’s because Martin follows 92 other twitterers, whereas his publication (yes, Press Gazette again) only follows two (both members of staff).

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