This post was going to talk about how you could use GMail’s Filter function to easily post to Zannel, Flickr, Vox etc using one email address from your smart-phone. But guess what? Filter’s only let you forward to ONE email address, so that isn’t going to work. Not that this means it isn’t doable – it’s just one step harder – you have to go elsewhere and set up a private mailing list and then use your Filter to forward to that. This marks the first time GMail’s ever let me down though; not a good sign.

But that doesn’t matter either really. Because I’ve been in contact with the good people of Zannel and they tell me that next week a whole bunch of new features are going to be released; that “goes far beyond RSS and puts us in the position to be a true Twitter ++”. And that they’re also “working through an international rollout”.

Now, I think I got a sneak preview of two of these new features today, with buttons appearing (and then disappearing an hour later) to link your account in with Flickr and Twitter. We’ll have to wait until next week to see what else they have in store.

But what this does mean is there should be no need to double post to Zannel and Flickr.

Which brings us to a discussion on Presence.

The internet has splintered into a bunch of mini-nets. OK, maybe it hasn’t really been the same since Usenet. Anyway, some of us like to wander around the internet, stopping to say hello here and there. But it sure seems like the bulk of netizens find the one place they feel comfortable, and make that their primary community. Be they LiveJournal’ers, Flickr’ers, MySpace kidz, YouTube’rs, VIRB indies or Facebookers. So if you want to get the maximum benefit from all these communities, you can either spend all day posting on each – or post selectively and know that it will flow through to others.

You can achieve a lot by simply chaining RSS feeds together; for instance you can post to Pownce, Twitter, Jaiku and Tumblr in one go. VIRB has an import blog function, so you can write on your personal blog and have it appear there too. You can link your Vox and Flickr together to automatically cross post, ditto Vox and LiveJournal. You can even Twitter while you’re in SecondLife. And can pull RSS feeds out of YouTube.

Tumblr is probably the best way to unite all your various presences together – just plug all your RSS feeds into it. And don’t be daunted by their five feed limit, this is easily overcome using Yahoo!Pipes.

And that’s why I said a lack of RSS made Zannel a no go. It’s no fun having your content locked into one community, however much fun that place might be. We Grinders want to get our message out as far and as wide as possible, with a minimum of fuss. Hopefully these tips will help you do that.

UPDATE! The Flickr, Twitter tie-in is now live(ish YMMV). I’d recommend using the post-to-Twitter judiciously though; people don’t generally react well to auto-spamming on Twitter.