Identified by its creators as the “dead simple place to post everything,” Posterous is a blogging platform focused on ease-of-use. Because of its relative simplicity in comparison to more hefty platforms like Blogger and Wordpress, some consider Posterous and its main competitor Tumblr to qualify as a form of microblogging. For instance, in a 2008 review of Posterous, ReadWriteWeb identified it as “minimalist blogging.” A more accurate understanding of the capabilities of Posterous is evident in an Ars Technica side-by-side comparison with Tumblr, both of which Chris Foreman (2010) describes as “quick blogging tools…characterized by two main features that set them apart from more traditional blogging tools.” The first concerns a content-specific focus as text, images, videos and links appear “in a suitable format for its content type” and the second involves the relative ease and speed of posting content. Perhaps it is because of this second feature that some might be quick to declare Posterous as a microblogging service or tool, but, as its creators boast on their FAQ, “there are no limits to what you can post.”
In my experience of using Posterous and witnessing how students use the service, Posterous is quicker to begin and easier to maintain than Blogger. In part, this is because Posterous offers multiple methods of content production, including posting options by email, mobile and web. It also has to do with how Posterous handles the content a user sends. Text-based content, like a Microsoft Word document for example, attached to an email to Posterous appears onsite via Scribd, a free, HTML5-based document-sharing service. Posterous arranges images emailed or uploaded into a web-friendly gallery; music and video files show up on Posterous in web-based Flash players, too.
This format suitability to content is important to note because not all students coming into college-level courses possess the knowledge necessary to deem the appropriate format for a particular kind of content. For instance, I required students in previous semesters to sign up for Blogger accounts. This was as much because of my own greater familiarity with that particular blogging platform as because of the potential for students to make their own unique, personal stamp on the blog they created. That it was possible to post blog entries via Google Docs was an additional positive influence on this decision. I also thought students might help me learn more about the particular possibilities of Blogger, that this technology could provide an opportunity for us to learn the technology together.
The potential complexity of Blogger caused some trepidation, though. The great freedom of choice led to some poor design decisions by students, including color and font size. There were additional formatting issues, too, as too many students composed blog entries in Microsoft Word and then copied and pasted the content to Blogger only to be upset by significant problems with alignment and spacing. Since the shift to Posterous, the vast majority of formatting problems have disappeared. So long as students attached their text-based efforts rather than copying and pasting direct into the body of an email, the all-important formatting of their blog entries remained intact on Posterous. As mentioned in the next section of this chapter, the autoposting feature of Posterous in particular made for a unique success across all courses.
While many things precipitated the move from Blogger to Posterous, the latter’s overall ease-of-use was a dominant determinant. Posterous has a sharper focus on how someone might want to provide content, that personalizing a particular blog space comes as much from the content as the format, that some bloggers might be more concerned with pushing content than anything else. Embedding documents, images and videos in Posterous happens with little to no frustration. There are also a limited number of themes to choose from to eliminate the possibility of color clash and font fiasco. Posterous features a streamlined process for blogging in my writing-centered courses; it has proven to be a better choice for students.
Some examples:
http://johnnyc2010.posterous.com/
http://savsanford.posterous.com/
http://kroby.posterous.com/