Posterous Turns Anyone Into a Blogging Powerhouse

Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.

The Internet’s in the middle of an incredibly important shift: it’s moving away from a closed, geek-only space with tons of prerequisites and knowledge required, to a place where anyone can be involved, share themselves, and partake in all of the cool stuff the Internet has to offer.

A lot of this is due to social networks. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and others are making both the creation and the consumption of information – whether it’s about our friends, issues that interest us, or whatever – easier than ever. This ease of use is a crucial step of making the whole Web mainstream, and not just Google and email.

One of my favorite, and I think one of the most important, tools out there is Posterous. What is Posterous? It’s the simplest, easiest, and fastest way for anyone in the known universe to become a blogger, a journalist, a lifestreamer.

If you can send an email, you can create a Posterous blog. That’s because that’s the way you blog – you simply send an email to post [at] posterous.com. Your email gets posted, and you get a dedicated URL for all your thoughts – often yourname.posterous.com.

If you attach an image to your email, it gets put into your Posterous post. If you attach a song, people can play it from within the post. If you paste a YouTube link, the video will automatically get embedded into the post. There’s no formatting or coding necessary (though there’s plenty of opportunity for it if you so desire), no knowledge required. Just fire off an email, and you’re set.

Getting Social

Posterous can also be set to work with your social networking accounts. By default, Posterous will automatically update things like your Facebook status, your Twitter status, your other blogs, or even an iTunes podcast, every time you email Posterous. But by sending your post to different email addresses (like twitter at posterous.com or facebook at posterous.com), you can specify where in the social world your post goes.

Endless Uses

The ways you can use Posterous are absolutely infinite. You can password-protect your site, and make it a family blog, with pictures and notes. You can make it a photo-journal, with galleries that get automatically created by Posterous. It’s the perfect venue for thoughts and things that are too long for the one-sentence nature of things like Facebook and Twitter, and can be everything from a notebook to a full-fledged and popular blog.

There’s support for custom domains (you can buy imsupercool.com instead of imsupercool.posterous.com), analytics for tracking visitors, RSS support, and much, much more.

There are already a ton of interesting people on Posterous (check out a few of them here), including yours truly. I’ve got two – one is a personal site, for pictures, music, and the like; the other is The 2.0 Life+, where there’s lots of cool tips, links, and more for readers of this blog.

If you’re looking to start a blog, a presence online, or just a place to share your photos with your family and friends, fire off an email to Posterous.

There is no step 2.

What’s your favorite blogging tool? Do you use Posterous, or Tumblr, or anything else for super-fast blogging?

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