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About a month ago, I stumbled on a new social media site called Posterous. What is posterous? Taken from Posterous’ website; “Posterous lets you post things online fast using email. You email us at [email protected] and we reply instantly with your new posterous blog.
If you can use email, you can have your own website to share thoughts and media with friends, family and the world.
Posterous is NOT a micro blog.” You can use Posterous to post to almost every social media site out there. If a site isn’t listed, just wait, they will add it once the site takes off. But it doesn’t hurt to shoot the staff a quick email with the request to add it to their lists.
With Posterous you can send photos, audio files, links, documents and videos. You can even send both at the same time. It will figure it out and post it for you. The files supported by Posterous are:
If you send multiple picture(s) to Posterous, it will resize to a web-friendly format and when you post multiple pictures in post, it will create a gallery.
When attaching music, the system will send the mp3 to a eb app that plays mp3s and it will drop in place on your blog.
When sending video, they will transcode your video so that it can be viewed in a flash player to view in any browser. It’s even setup so it can be played on an Iphone without using flash! They will host most videos files, so there is no extra work with uploading to a hosting site and then setting up the links. Posterous will do the hard work for you.
If you add links to your message you do not have to worry about adding the HTML coding, Posterous will set this up for you. If you send a YouTube link of a video to Posterous, it will automatically link and embedd the video right there on your site! Posterous can link and embedd to YouTube, Google Video, Hulu, Funny Or Die, Omnisio, MixWit, Justin.TV, Fliggo, Vimeo, motionbox, TED Talks, Viddler, Dailymotion, Blip.tv, Revver, TeacherTube, GodTube, seesmic, and Brightcove.
Posterous also offers autopost. Autopost is where you post to Posterous and Posterous will then go out to your linked social media accounts and post them for you. Such as if you use Flickr, you can upload your pictures to Posterous and Posterous will then go to Flickr and post them to Flickr. This will work with Facebook, Twitter, and many other soical media sites.
My Thoughts
In my opinion Posterous, is good for basic posting, quick, posting where formatting is not all that important, social media platform updates, Flickr updates causal bloggers and new bloggers. If a profession blogger or blogger who wants more formatting options, this system is not for them.
What I like:
I like that I can post from email, can use the booklet tool and post that page directly to my blog and add my comments directly. I like the idea of posting to flickr. Buy doing this I save time and do not have to open and both sites and upload gather links and post. Now I can email the pictures to Posterous and they upload to posterous and creates the gallery for me. Then I can autopost to my various across the web.
What I do not like:
I do not like the limited formatting options available in any publish systems used by Posterous. What I have to do is submit to Posterous using email, or booklet. Then I have to open the booklet and edit and format what I can. But the editor is almost useless. Then if I post to my blog, I then have to go into the blog and edit, format, add tags, categories, and SEO information. At least I do not have to write the article again.
Autopost has limited options. If I post from the web it will automatically post to every site on your list. There is not a feature to turn off twitter, blog posting and several other sites. There are times, when I do not want to post to every site I have listed. There should be a check box to turn this feature off and on when needed. When using the booklet, you can select what sites you want to send to but, in some cases I won’t be using that feature. Themes are limited. Finally javascript is disabled.
What I use Posterous for:
I use Posterous mostly for random thoughts, blog posts, blog articles I find and want to share, autopost to flickr, blog and way to get my blog stories seen and read. Throughout the day, as I go through my daily blog readings, twitter links, and Blog Engage updates, I share the ones I like and the ones that will benefit others. Hopefully those posts will start up a conversation.
Another feature that I plan to start using is the email to post feature. There are times when I do not have access to the internet but I still have my laptop or netbook with me. I can open up Thunderbird or Outlook and start writing posts. When I get the chance, I will write up the posts in the email client and post it to the send box. Once I am back online, my mail client will then email all the posts I have created.
Who uses Posterous?
About James
Hey thanks for giving me your feedback on using Posterous. I'm using it to track Blog Engage activity also. It's pretty neat. I did a post about using it and since then I found some new ways to make the best of it. I agree that it would be good if we could limit where each post appears, maybe that's coming soon.
Thanks for the all of the info.
@Ileane
My recent post Posterous – Lifestreaming or Not?
Thanks for visiting. I have been tracking Blog Engage activity as well as activity on both of my sites. Please post up what new things you can do with Posterous.
My recent post What is Posterous and Why I Use It
I'm not sure about what is Posterous. I mean if you can post your articles and blog, what about your own blog? would you rather post it on Posterous rather than your own blog? If you are re posting your articles…that will create duplicate content right? Enlighten me pls.
With Posterous, when you post to their site, Posterous will then autopost to the verious other sites across the social media network that you tell them to, such as, Twitter, FriendFeed, Blogger, WordPress, Facebook etc. When you post it to your blog, it will put your article in block quotes and at the bottom it will say posted or emailed via Posterous. There will be a link back to the original. If you post to the blog and posted to Posterous it will quoted again and give you a comment field to add more information about why you are sharing it on Posterous. You can also post other sites using the booklet firefox plugin. I use this feature if I find a really great article or tutorial I want to share with others. Examples would be go to blog.evolutionarydesigns.net and see some of the posts. On this site look through some of the posts. If you see via Posterous then you will see some my posterous posts. They will have a link back to the orignal source. This gives to the original post and writer.
Posterous can all be use drive traffic to your site and other sites as well.
My recent post links for 2009-12-18