Yes, I’m writing this article on Posterous using my traditional blogging tool, Movable Type. The irony is not lost on me. And no complaints about MT – it’s easy to use, stable, and very well behaved.
But Posterous is innovative in some important ways. If you have held off on blogging because it just seemed like too much work, or seemed too limiting, you may want to jump in with Posterous.
Here are some of the cool things you can do with Posterous:
You can blog via email. Just attach a photo, write an email and send it to Posterous. It magically appears on your blog. The subject line is your blog post title. The body content is the entry. The photo is sized automatically. Full links are clickable.
You can blog on your mobile device. Let’s say you’re at an event with your iPhone. You take a picture, write a cutline, and email it to Posterous. You’re liveblogging, now, baby. Grab an iPod Touch and blog your way across Europe. As Ram Dass might say, “Blog Here Now.”
It’s rich media friendly. Email an MP3 to Posterous and the tool knows to wrap the file in an MP3 player. Record a voice memo on your iPhone and send it. Email a YouTube link and it embeds automatically.
Posterous lets you scrape the web. Drag the Posterous toolbar to your browser. Then, when you find content online that you want to blog, click and it opens a window. Choose from available images on the page, write a title, write your comments, and click – you’ve blogged it, and you’re back to your web trawl.
Posterous ignites your networks. Your post is auto-magically distributed to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, or any other popular network you choose.
You can still blog the old-fashioned way from a control panel – useful if you want to clean up a mobile post, for example. Some other features: It’s easy to point your Posterous blog to your web domain, if you wish. You can install Google Analytics with one line of code. And Posterous has a Tumblr-like network feature that keeps you in touch with other Posterous bloggers.
I do have some concerns: Posterous accelerates our “Remix” culture, and probably runs over some copyrights by making it ever-easier to repurpose protected content. From a design standpoint, Posterous is clean and effective, but there’s just one theme. I have to believe the service will soon allow its customers to reskin their sites.
I first learned of Posterous when Steve Rubel moved his work (formerly Micropersuasion) to the tool. He’s changed his blogging style since the switch; shorter posts, more web scrapings, more frequent updates. More interactive. As he says, it’s lifestreaming, a bridge between Twitter and a blog.
Here’s a nice guide on using Posterous, courtesy of Old Media, New Tricks.
From SteveRubel.com: Getting the Mosterous from Posterous
I really like Posterous (my friend Karen maintains her tumblelog there). I would probably have used their service had I not known so many people already using Tumblr, the functionality of which is almost exactly the same.
I love Posterous (I’ve had a blog there since October last year), and I love it for all the reasons you list.
However, I have always resisted the idea that people are not blogging because the tools are too difficult, or that if I could post photos on Flickr with 50% fewer clicks, I would post more photos. To me, it’s always the content that determines when I post, and when I have that ready, the tools are the easy part. Don’t get me wrong, Posterous is a great tool, and I hope it gets better (like allowing trackbacks, etc.), but I don’t like the fact that some of its enhancements are aimed at ease/speed of posting. For example, I am not looking forward to the day when pictures are posted as soon as they are taken directly from my camera, which one of the founders is excited about. To me, the blog should be a curation tool, not just a posting tool.