If you can email, you can blog

For those of you who’d like to try blogging but feel a bit intimidated, there’s a new platform that makes it very easy to start your own blog. If you know how to send an email, you can blog. That’s the premise of posterous.com. You don’t have to sign up or go through any complicated setup steps - all you have to do to start blogging is to send them an email at post@posterous.com and they’ll reply giving you your own site at http://yourname.posterous.com. Once you receive their welcome email, you’ll be taken through a simple process to allocate a password so you can access the control panel to your site.

You can email photos, videos, MP3s audio files and other files such as Word documents, Powerpoint presentations and pdfs and they will be instantly uploaded as a blog post. The text of your email will become the text of the blog post. If you are in the US, you can even blog by SMS by authorizing your phone once you’ve got yourself a posterous blog.

Posterous can also automatically cross-post whatever you email to your other sites such as Twitter, Flickr and the major blog platforms such as Wordpress and Blogger as well as self-hosted blog sites. Also the audio feed is an iTunes-ready podcast feed so people can subscribe to your audio content via iTunes without your having to do anything more.

In the interests of simplicity, Posterous does not offer options to add widgets to your sidebar and there are no tools such as Categories or a Blogroll that you would normally expect to see on most blogs. For most people who just want to post items by email as and when they feel like it and wherever they may be, that simplified interface means there is less to think about - all you have to do is send an email and voila, you’re blogging.

You also cannot customise the design or layout of your site but then, again, the focus is on simplicity. So while Posterous may not be right for people who want the full blog experience with the ability to have a customized design, widgetized sidebars and all the usual elements such as Categories etc that help your visitors navigate around your blog, it’s a great starting point for people who are happy with the simple, streamlined way to post their content online.

For those of us who already have blogs, Posterous can be a fun supplemental tool - if you set up the automatic cross-posting function, you can blog by email via Posterous. It also means that your content is available on another platform and this can be helpful for making it more widely available to a different audience. Via your Posterous control panel, you can subscribe to follow other people’s posterouses (posteri?) and vice versa so it’s a great way to explore other multi-media posterous bloggers.

I’ve been using Utterz.com for my multi-media blogging but I will try Posterous. I like Utterz because it gives you the option of blogging by phone - ie you just dial a number from your mobile or a landline and speak, then press a couple of buttons on the phone and you have an audio-blog which is automatically cross-posted to your blog(s). I may still use Utterz for that. But from what I can see, Posterous has the advantage on other points in that the video player looks bigger and cleaner and for text posting there is no text character limit, compared to Utterz.