Posterous vs Tumblr, and why they're awesome for bloggers.

Yeah yeah, so you’re a blogger and you’re not too sure about these microblogging things.  You’ve avoided Twitter like the plague, you think that removing vowels from words does NOT make a good product name (Tumblr, Raptr, etc.) and you feel like you have too much to say to be limited by letter limits.  You probably haven’t checked out Tumblr or Posterous yet, because you’re happy with Wordpress and it “gets the job done”.

Let’s start out with talking about Tumblr.  Tumblr is a microblogging service that makes it easy (via a bookmarklet right in your browser) to post photos, quotes, videos, and text.  Your blog name is username.tumblr.com but you can use any domain you want.  You can post via IM, email, or the web.  It can automatically slurp in your Twitter posts, any RSS feed that you give it, your LiveJournal, etc.  You can customize the theme far easier than a Wordpress theme.  Disadvantages over Wordpress?  Well, you don’t have that self-hosted access to all the files the way you do if you have your own Wordpress.org site.  It doesn’t come with comments set up right out of the box and requires adding Disqus to it to make it useful.  When you bring in RSS feeds, they sometimes look funky and aren’t formatted right – and you can’t get full text.  Tumblr allows you to “follow” other users, giving you a dashboard that shows you all the latest posts from everyone and gives you the ability to “reblog” them.  Reblogging feels incestuous, it feels like a halfassed commenting system and results in a LOT of duplicate content on your dashboard while everyone you followed rapidly reblogs each other’s annoying uninteresting content to add their oneliners.

Posterous, on the other hand, feels like a breath of fresh air.  First of all, you don’t need to register.  Jjust send an email to post@posterous.com and they will automatically create a blog for you.  You’ll be able to edit the blog by adding in all your email addresses, so that you can just email from any of your email addys and they’ll show up.  If you attach a photo or video, it will automatically host them on the web for you.  If you attach multiple photos, it makes a little gallery for you.  You can set up autoposting features that will automatically send your photos to your Flickr account, send a tweet blast to Twitter with the blog link, post the text of your blog post to your Facebook, or post the full text to LiveJournal.  You don’t have to login, it just knows who you are because you sent it from your email address.  You can set up multiple Posterous accounts and tell it which one to post to.  Here are some of the neat features:

• Ability to set up group blogs.  Add other people’s email addresses as contributors, and then they can also send email and contribute to the blog without having to register.
• Ability to customize and filter the email address to send the email to what you want.  flickr@posterous.com will just send to your flickr account and nowhere else.  twitter+facebook@posterous.com will just post to your Twitter account and Facebook.
• Great for smart phones, because it’s the easiest way possible to send content from your phone right to your blog.
• They give you 1GB of free space, but say that if you need more, just email them.  They plan to offer unlimited premium features in the future.
• Private blogs.  If you email private@posterous.com, then you’ll get a private URL that you’ll have to give people to share that post, and it won’t post to your autoposting accounts (twitter, flickr, etc.) that you’ve set up.  Private + group blog screams enterprise solution to me.
• Commenting built right in.
• Easy tagging.  Simply put (tag: worldofwarcraft) in the email and it will automatically tag the post as so.

Fundamental difference between the two?  Tumblr is great for aggregating your content from around the web (bringing information about you IN).  For example, check out Michael Zenke’s Tumblr which basically sucks in all of his web activity in one place.  Posterous is great for sending content OUT to other sites.  For example, right now I have two set up – a gaming one (that I’ll use for this site) and a personal one.  The personal posterous site blasts out my images to Flickr, my text to my Tumblr blog (because it’s pretty), my posts to Facebook and LiveJournal.   It basically gives me an easy way to post here from anywhere, and not have to worry about where to host the content.  Both sites host all of your photos and videos for you so that you don’t have to worry about where it goes.

Posterous just received another round of funding and seems to have a very passionate dev team to take it to higher places.  Tumblr feels to me like it’s really geared towards photographers who like to blast photos, and the reblogging thing is kind of frustrating to me.  I’m just not sure if I should make my tamibaribeau.com domain point to the Tumblr, or the Posterous.

Expect a lot more posts from me, and possibly a huge variety of topics.  I really don’t have enough to say about gaming to keep this blog full of content, but I often have a lot to say about media in general (web, print, film, art, photo, software).  I try to keep that stuff off of here, but lately, no one comments here anyway so I figure if I change up the content perhaps people will actually enjoy the blog MORE.

Tami Baribeau is the Associate Producer for Metaplace, Inc, currently working on Island Life.  She is also the Lead Editor of feminist gaming blog The Border House, and the National Facebook Games Examiner for Examiner.com.  She can be reached on Twitter or by email.