Posterous has caused quite a stir in the blogging world, because it all but removes even the moderate level of complexity that other blogging platforms tend to put in the way of simply publishing.
The service has even managed, somehow, to alter my view a little on using free, non-self-hosted blogging platforms, though I’d still say it’s not for everyone.
The fact is, most people can benefit from having a platform that’s easy to post multimedia content to on the fly and integrating with social networks even if they are au fait with the likes of WordPress, TypePad and Movable Type.
Of course, personal blogs will work just fine on Posterous, but also higher flying media professionals who want to share a lot of content with people, are often on the move with their smartphone, record and/or link to a lot of videos and podcasts, and whose personal brand is based more on the raw content than slick design.
Posterous designs aren’t shabby, by any means, and can be customised to a certain extent, but even if you use your own domain name or subdomain, it’s still obvious you’re hosting with a third party.
If you want to make money directly from your blog, by displaying ads for example, then you’re out of luck with Posterous (at the moment) though there’s no obvious restriction on linking to affiliate sites.
However, if you run a number of blogs on other platforms, Posterous could well be an easy platform for publicising them. With good social media integration, while your Posterous blog may not directly lead to increased revenue/sales, it’s another way of driving visitors to other projects.
You can post pretty much anything to Posterous, but it does seem to lend itself well to shorter or media rich posts. It’s also ludicrously easy to set up multi-author blogs, just by authorising the email addresses of all your writers.
Even if you use your domain for other types of content, such as a forum or a shopping cart, if you can change your domain name records you can set up a subdomain for the blog portion of your site, which then redirects to the Posterous servers, while the rest of your content remains on your own server.
In fact, the only time I’d suggest avoiding Posterous (unless you’re paranoid about the service shutting down and your content disappearing) is if you have a very strong design identity, or you need a more complicated blog setup that only self-hosting will allow you.
In reality, most of us could do with cutting down the complexity of our blogs, and Posterous might just be one way of doing that.
What do you think of Posterous? Do you use it for any of your blogs?