E-Media Tidbits

Amy Gahran From e-mail (top) to blog post (bottom), instantly. Has blogging ever been easier, or more inclusive?

Many news organizations want community members to blog on their site. But how do you get them to actually do it? Most community editors face significant challenges in getting people to post. It's difficult to encourage vibrant public conversation through blogs when most people still aren't even comfortable with using popular blogging tools such as WordPress or Blogger.

Enter Posterous: a fantastically intuitive, quick, and easy blogging platform based on a service popular with even the most technically challenged online newbies: e-mail. You don't even need to register -- or to have Web access -- to use it. It's a very new service, but I think Posterous could become a hugely popular blogging tool, as well as a great tool for blogging on the move (moblogging).

To start a Posterous blog, all a user has to do is send an e-mail to post@posterous.com. That's it. You don't even need to specify a subject line -- but if you do, that becomes the title of your first post. Posterous creates your blog as soon it gets your initial e-mail. (Here's my Posterous blog.)

It gets better. If you e-mail photos, video, or audio to Posterous, those media files are automatically posted to your blog with a download link. Also, if you e-mail Posterous a link to a video on YouTube, Google Video, Justin.TV, Vimeo or Omnisio video, that also will be automatically embedded in a post. If you attach more than one image to an e-mail, Posterous will create a gallery. You can also embed PDF, PowerPoint, and Word documents using the free document-sharing service Scribd.

As for the conversation? Posterous will e-mail to you comments posted to your blog, which you can reply to by e-mail. Posterous also includes social networking functions such as user profiles and the ability to follow other users if you register.

TechCrunch reports: "New features will be launched over the summer, says [Posterous] co-founder Sachin Agarwal, including customized cascading style sheets and the ability to cross-post to other blogging platforms." This last feature may well persuade me to stop posting via Wordpress. It's that good.

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What's the Posterous business model? ReadWriteWeb says the site was founded with "about $15,000 in seed capital. Posterous is currently free and plans to start selling premium features in the future."

This service does have a significant drawback: It's pretty easy to fake a posting on someone else's blog simply by spoofing their e-mail address in the "from" field of a message to Posterous.

How can you put Posterous to use, and why might it be especially helpful? These ideas spring to mind:

• Easy engagement. If you meet someone who might be a great blogger for your site, just ask them to send an e-mail to the Posterous address -- and to forward to you the reply from Posterous, once they receive it. (That tells you what their blog address is.)
• Easy sharing. If someone has document you'd like to put online (like a photo, or a scan of a weird response letter they received from a public official), do the same. You also can simply forward to Posterous e-mails (such as press releases, interviews, etc.) that you want your readers to see verbatim.
• It's mobile. You can use Posterous from any cell phone that can also send and receive e-mail (which is more and more of them, these days). When you can blog or reply to comments on the go, your site becomes that much more timely -- and thus compelling.
• Easy group blogs. To set up a group blog on Posterous (where several people can contribute) you just need to register the e-mail addresses of all contributors.
• Fairly easy cross-posting. If someone already has another blog, they can cross-post to Posterous just by setting up e-mail alerts keyed off their RSS feed from using Feedburner, Feedblitz, or xFruits to cross-post into Posterous.

I'm sure there are plenty of other possibilities. Please comment below with your ideas or examples.