Bob Baker's The Buzz Factor

Would you like a quick and easy way to post photos, audio and even video clips online? And be able to automatically post links to them on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more? Without spending a dime?

Then you should take a look at Posterous.com.

Here's why, along with a quick history lesson ...

Blogs, MP3 audio files, and streaming video have been around for several years. Over the last couple of years the short Twitter text update (which has been adopted by Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and more) became a more prominent way that people communicate online.

Makes sense. Few technical skills are required and it hardly takes any time to post something.

But instead of posting just simple text announcments all the time, people started linking to longer and more in-depth sources within their tweets and updates. This led to the popularity of URL shortener sites like Tinyurl.com and Bit.ly, which make it easy to fit live links within 140 characters.

Great. But the content you linked to had to be hosted somewhere. If you created a new video, you had to upload it to YouTube first. Then you had to convert the YouTube page address to a shorter URL. Then you posted an announcement with a link to the video.

Same thing with audio content. Create the MP3 (usually of your music), post it on your blog or MySpace page, shorten the URL, then post a link to it on Twitter.

That's a lot of steps just to send people to hear and see your newest stuff.

Now, TwitPic.com has been around for a while. This site allows you to email or upload photos, and the service automatically posts a short link to them with your quick description.

That's cool. But what if you could also do that with audio and video files? That's why Posterous is such a great no-cost service.

All you do is email a file to post@posterous.com. It will host the file and create a simple blog page for it. It will turn your audio and video files into streaming players. It even hosts Doc, PDF, and PowerPoint files.

Set up a Posterous account and you can even set it up to autopost to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social sites. It even creates the shortened URL for you. Super simple.

See how I used it to post multimedia updates during my recent trip to Los Angeles and San Diego. Just visit bob-baker.posterous.com and scroll through the first three pages to see photos and video of Jason Mraz performing, Chaka Kahn rehearsing, Bootsy Collins, Chad Smith of Red Hot Chili Peppers, singer Andrae Crouch, and more -- as well as audio updates during my travels.

The main drawback is that you can't embed the files you send to Posterous on other web sites. But it's still a pretty cool service.

I bet you're already thinking about how you can use it to communicate more quickly and easily with your fans.

-Bob

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