Past Posterous

I’ve been having a go at the latest chic-​​geek blogging tool — pos­terous — recently, as you’ll be able to tell if you look at the posts I’ve made here over the last month or so. But, in the end, I’ve decided not to use it. Why? Read on.

Just to be clear, before I go on to my objec­tions: it’s damned good. If you haven’t yet tried it yourself, the high­lights, as I see it, are:

• You can post really easily using email (just email post@posterous.com right now, and it’ll start a new blog for you – the email address you send from is your log-​​in).
• No login; no set-​​up; no con­fig­ur­a­tion. A monkey could do it.
• Free – always a con­sid­er­a­tion. And no apparent limits on anything.
• Great media handling out of the box – send photos, videos, mp3s and it will sort out a nifty player for you.
• Syndication – it’ll repost the content you send to photo/​video/​text sharing sites and twitter it as well.

See these posts by incum­bent Edelman and iCrossing social media cham­pions for a taste of the fervour that people are feeling.

That’s all dandy. It’s really dandy. If I had to set up a blog for someone, I’d send them straight to posterous.

So what’s this ‘past–pos­terous’ nonsense, you ask? Like most things, there’s a com­bin­a­tion of reasons that add up to a dis­com­fort about the whole thing.

(1) I can rep­licate almost all of those features in WordPress. Post via email; audio-​​player, all the rest. It’s not simple, but it isn’t that hard either.

(2) It may sound a bit sad, but I am con­cerned about own­er­ship of my content. On my own (rented) server space, I have that (as long as I pay the rent). If I put my stuff on a third-​​party service, then I very-​​slightly lose own­er­ship and control.

(3) I also wonder how search-​​engines will inter­pret this. The first posting of content is normally taken as canon­ical by Google (i.e the real, original source) and con­sequently appears highest in search results. Duplicated content is deprec­ated. This protects against content thieves in normal cir­cum­stances, but in this case, the canon­ical source would pre­sum­ably be posterous.com, not your personal URL. Another reason to have one canon­ical source is to protect against black-​​hat SEO types posting the same content on multiple, inter-​​linked sites, much ermm… like a fully fledged pos­terous account might create. That’s a worry, too. I’d like my blog to be the canon­ical source and not marked as a content duplic­ator. I’ve had a quick look round the SEO blogs and don’t think anyone has an answer on that yet.

(4) Posterous will undoubtedly launch paid-​​for plans or advert­ising schemes to earn revenue. I don’t know what those are or whether they will be suc­cessful. I hope that they are. In the mean time, it’s a zero-​​revenue business. I don’t want to trust my content to that. And I don’t know yet what sac­ri­fices I might have to make to keep a free service in the future. Adverts? Pop-​​Ups?

Beyond that, there’s another reason. One that twists my melon considerably.

Is there such a thing as too-​​easy?

For me, there is.

If creating a blog post is as easy as hitting a button and typing twenty words, then I’m opening a Pandora’s Box.

Because I could do that all day, every day. I just thought of a new blog post then – whoosh – there it is. I could be creating 12 blog posts while you’re in the bog. For many long-​​time blog owners it’s a blessed release. Coming up with new ideas and new posts is a pain. The hard part about blogging isn’t setting one up, as their pro­lif­er­a­tion shows. There are already at least 200mn blogs. The hard part is keeping with it. Journalistic writing is hard – if you’re doing it right. If you’re doing it right, then you’re thinking about the audience all the time and turning your words and how much or how little you give to make them happier.

One reason to keep with it (and I have several, just in case) is so that people will respect your blog as a quality source, in some respect. You’ve filtered and pro­cessed the inform­a­tion so they don’t have to. And hope­fully presented it in an agree­able way. You are providing Signal not Noise.

There are some great pos­terous blogs and tumblr blogs, I’m sure. But they are dif­ferent – not better or worse – from a really good blog. Some people probably have a twitter-​​stream that could be made into a book. Not me.

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