Deadpoet’s Cave

The idea behind Posterous is preposterously simple: blog by email. (hat tip to Michele Martin).

Anyone who can email can now blog. Just send a email to post@posterous.com from your regular email address. (Hmmm… wonder how they filter out spam!)

You’ll get a reply which tells you that you’ve posted successfully.

The first time you get this reply, you’ll be asked to click a link to create a password. With that, you’ve created your account.

Easy peasy.

Each time you email/post on posterous, after the initial one, you’ll get a confirmation email saying that you’ve successfully posted. This is to prevent someone from spoofing your email and posting stuff to your blog without your knowledge.

Ok, those in the know are probably saying, “But you can also email blog posts via Blogger.”

But that still requires account creation to begin with.

Besides, Posterous has a few tricks up its sleeve.

You can email word docs, powerpoints, pdfs, photos, links, and Posterous will automatically try to present it in the nicest way it knows.

For example:

• Post one photo, and Posterous resizes it to fit the blog.
• Post a bunch of photos, Posterous creates a mini gallery.
• Post a document, spreadsheet or pdf, Posterous embeds it in the post using Scribd’s iPaper (don’t worry what this is, the process is entirely invisible - you just email the attachment).
• Post a YouTube URL, Posterous automatically embed the video.
• Post an mp3 file, Posterous creates an embedded mp3 player in the post for the file.

Just by clicking Send.

Check out the FAQ, which shows some of these features in action:
http://posterous.com/faq

Apparently, comments are also handled entirely through email. I haven’t tested it out though. Check out Siva’s post. Looks like normal comments but they were posted via email, except the first one. I suspect if I subscribe to Siva’s Posterous site, I will probably be able to email/post a comment to his blog without even visiting it.

I tried embedding a PDF, but that didn’t go too well. All the text ended up as gibberish. Also, they claim to have some ways to determine if the email really originated from you, so less worries about security.

Posterous is pretty new, so no bells-and-whistles yet. I suppose they want to get the basic features working properly before adding things like different themes, sidebar customization etc. Well, they’ve said there’ll always be a free basic service but they’ll have premium features for which they will charge.

But right now, it’s dirt simple.

Just the thing to get people who’ve been holding out on blogging to start.

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