Posterous

I’ve spent a lot of the last two days playing with Posterous and can’t help thinking there’s something BIG going on here.

There was a time when blogging was the preserve of HTML gurus (which is partly where the whole Internet marketing thing started) and normal people like us couldn’t participate.

We had those grottty fixed page web sites (if anything) and relied on the SEO witch doctors to help us get traffic.

But the power of “content” drove waves of innovation with people bringing us new and increasingly simpler ways to get involved.

My first experience, like most people I guess, was with Blogger, and probably before Google sucked it up.

Eventually I matured into WordPress (which isn’t simple, in anybody’s terms) but is still far and away the most powerful blogging platform.

Next up I got involved in Twitter, technology for which is really simple but finding a business context for it isn’t.

My next discovery was Tumblr, which wasn’t so simple (e.g. customization just didn’t work if we used Firefox, but it does now) and the UI is so good this rapidly became my favorit for some jobs.

Now we have Posterous, the simplicity of which is mind blowing.

First up there’s no need to sign up for an account.  We can just email something to post@posterous.com.  It will strip all the email stuff and create a blog post complete with URL.

We need to get an account (free) in order to edit any posts and create a profile, which is no hardship.

Once that’s in place we can invite other people to post to the same blog, import our legacy blogs from just about anywhere, and set up Posterous to update all our blogging sites complete with pictures, video and even MP3 files.

Posterous will even post our MP3 files to iTunes – podcasting made simple

The world seems to be targeting whatever we want to say and recording it.  Delicious ( I can never remember the way they split the name up, Xmarks,Google Bookmarks, Digg, Diigo, Zemanta etc all seem to be focused on the same thing – capturing our interaction with the world AKA the Internet.

But Posterous seems to have moved this on to a whole new level.

Personally I haven’t figured out quite what this means in terms of Search Engines and how those behemoths get to find us, but one thing is clear.

My mother (79 and going strong but with no concept of technology) could, and probably will, get into blogging in a heartbeat with Posterous.

Simply by sending an email she can now publish on the Internet.  Sharing with the world what she thinks and her day to day experiences is within her reach.

The same applies to anybody, which has to be a good thing.

BTW Posterous has an interesting tie up with Facebook and the ability to create groups of people who can post to the same blog.

In terms of our family this gets to be really interesting.

From my mother’s perspective, she has a son in Australia, two grandchildren in New Zealand, another son in Scotland, a grand daughter in Oxford (where she lives) a grandson in Chicago and a Great Grandson in Chicago.

How cool is it that with Prosperous the whole family can contribute to the same stream and stay in touch, for free of course.

What’s the business perspective?  Beats me, but I’ll try to figure one out.

In the meantime you can take a look at what we’ve done at Front Office Box on Prosperous

Related articles by Zemanta

• Posterous vs. Tumblr: A Head to Head (mashable.com)
• Tutorial: Getting Started with Zemanta (zemanta.com)
• Posterous Wants You (To Import Your Blog) (mashable.com)

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Tagged as: Blog, Blogger, Google, Posterous, Tumblr, Twitter, Wordpress, Zemanta