Web 2.0 Lab Rat: Posterous

Image representing Posterous as depicted in Cr...

As I spend more and more time online in the world of Web 2.0, I find myself looking for more ways to streamline my communications. I realize that not everyone is buried as deeply as I am and that some people only use one tool for communication. But since part of my job is to teach a wide variety of educators in a wide variety of settings, not all of them are using the same tools. This puts me in a dilemma. How do I reach them all in as few a steps as possible? It would be ridiculous of me to think that I could keep up with all the tools and repeat myself on every platform just to cover as many people as possible. So how do I make sure to spread my information with as broad a brush as possible, thus saving myself hours of repetitive posts to different tools?

Enter Posterous. I had read about Posterous in the early spring but had dismissed it as just another tool. My cursory glance at it had given it poor marks for user friendliness, average marks as a tool, and I think I just failed to see what it was designed for. To me, it really just appeared to be a way to email or phone in your blog entries. Then I began communicating on a larger and larger number of platforms (Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Plurk, blogs, etc.) and thought "there has got to be an easier way".

This is where Posterous shines. A blog post sometime during the early summer encouraged me to go back and take another look at this tool. Although (at the time) it had no themes available to personalize the blogs it created, what I found was the incredibly useful tools it offers on the back side.

What it does:

Post to your blog through email
Post to MULTIPLE PLATFORMS IN ONE CLICK
Group and organize blog posts
Create easy slide shows of images
Manage just about EVERY other service through one portal.

Once you create an account, just manage your subscriptions and add all the services you would like posterous to update with your post. Now just go to the Posterous interface and start blogging. You can blog via email, mobile or the simple Posterous interface. As soon as you hit send, it updates your entire network with the post or a link to it.

I'm sure Posterous has other features, but frankly, I don't care. This is the one feature I need and it sold me on the tool completely. Since I started using Posterous to update my personal blog (not this one, my original blog at http://dabigleap.wordpress.com), Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, Plurk, etc. I rarely ever even go to some of them (especially Wordpress) anymore. I don't need to. If you are looking for a tool to streamline the communication process, give Posterous a try. Oh... and they have a few themes now too!