As you know, the rumour is that the cool kids aren’t blogging anymore. Oh no, they’re microblogging (Twitter, Facebook), or what I’m going to call miniblogging (tumblr, Posterous, Soup.io). Miniblogging is more than status updates, but not as onerous as a fully-fledged blog.

This category has really taken off in the last year. The not-so-reliable figures from Compete suggest their number of users has trebled over the last twelve months, something that you’ll already know anecdotally from the number of links you’ve encountered to these sites in your daily reading.

These sites are very similar in most respects, with a few genre-defining characteristics:

• Automatic import of social network content e.g. photos from flickr, delicious bookmarks.
• Quick posting using a bookmarklet (a javascript activated from a bookmark in your browser’s toolbar).
• Emphasis on frequent, short-form content rather than lengthy essays.
• Easy to repost others’ content, something that’s encouraged and seen as a mark of respect rather than ripping people off.
• Content is often ephemeral.
• Posts likely to be ‘secondary’ information – a youtube video, a picture you found elsewhere, a quote from someone in a mainstream website source.

Tumblr has been around the longest. And appears to be the market leader, with around three times the users of the other two. The different networks have a slightly different vibe. Tumblr users seem to be younger (on average), more likely to post images or multimedia than words and the site seems more sociable than the others. There are some great music blogs on it. It also picked up some geek appeal through the ability to automatically pick up on tags or a custom RSS feed such as the PRFail blog. Perhaps most crucially on its path to mainstream acceptance, the platform has also attracted celebrities such as Katy Perry and John Legend.

Posterous is technically superior to Tumblr, with its killer post-by-email feature taking a lot of pain out of posting from a mobile, posting MP3s and video. It also does a clever automatic posting to your other sites depending on rules you choose. Despite (or maybe because of) these technical innovations, though, it appears to have attracted a smaller but wordier crew, who use the platform as an easier, cheaper blog. A lot of the people whose regular blogs I follow have adopted Posterous as a lower-commitment, low maintenance secondary site (e.g. Steve Rubel, Charlie Peverett).

I’ve tried all of them and have currently settled on the underdog Soup.io as a secondary site. I set up a tumblr a long time ago but made the mistake of making it a lifestream site. As it turns out, my life is quite boring and trivial, especially if you’re not me, so the site was boring and trivial too. Posterous seemed like a good idea, but I realised I was using it as a proxy for posting here, which seemed a bit pointless. I was looking for four things, ultimately:

• a better bookmarking site than delicious, one that would capture pictures, videos, and music as well as bookmarks.
• a scrapbook for things I find interesting and want to keep/share but don’t warrant a blog post here. Sometimes it’s a place where I gather materials for a future article.
• some curation of my social networks – it automatically gathers favourites from youtube, ffffound, visualize.us etc. Theoretically, I will be able to find these later without visiting lots of separate sites.
• but without the boring bits – it doesn’t gather status updates or twitter conversations.

The Soup.io platform is not perfect any means – navigation and search are rather too minimal when it comes to finding things you posted more than a few days ago. You can use tags, but there’s no tag cloud. There aren’t any categories. There are permalinks, but they don’t contain any intelligible information. However, it looks OK out of the box, and the posting bookmarklet is fantastic. There’s also pretty much no limit on how much you post or import.

There’s a bigger worry over this whole sector, though.

None of these platforms currently have any form of advertising, premium features or any other way to make their business sustainable. That’s a worry if you post much content direct to the site. It would feel like a terrible waste if your site’s owners went bust and closed down the server. Lifestreaming non-starter Storytlr will presumably not be the last site in this crowded sector to be closed down.

The trouble is that if (say) tumblr starts posting advertising on people’s pages, their users could easily dump the platform and move to a competitor. The same goes for premium features: if one started to offer (say) a lightbox plug-in for snazzier picture display as a $5 a month extra, its competitors would be motivated to immediately offer the same feature for free.

So is miniblogging doomed? Or all but one of them?

Not quite, but it’s tricky. Survivors might focus on offering a technical USP that its competitors can’t match, which seems unlikely, and not necessarily a saving grace, as the tumblr vs posterous figures show. Otherwise, they could try to create loyalty to the platform, which is again improbable since their whole attraction is low commitment. There are social features on each, which could work to spark the loyalty of users – but these tend to be very lo-fi – I find it hard to believe that many people care about the number of Posterous subscribers they have, for example. Similarly, I can’t see the trick of offering brands their own pages for a sizeable fee working too well, since they don’t have anywhere near the reach of Facebook or MySpace fan pages.

To me, the solution lies in greater differentiation. It’s not the case that only one of these platforms can win, but they do need to become different from each other. For as long as the format and features are the same on each, then they are after exactly the same users, which is very clearly a less-than-zero-sum game.

Tumblr has attracted creatives, as I mentioned, and so maybe should do more to allow art works, music and photography to be seen/heard at their best. Perhaps build in a really simple ecommerce solution so that artists can sell or license their content. Posterous could perhaps do more for wordsmiths, or go completely the opposite direction and create a paid-for review platform (I don’t condone this, but it seems to be a business model). Maybe one site should get serious about being all-about multimedia bookmarking; or get serious about being a collaboration platform.

There’s still the threat that competitors will implement every new feature, but the more these sites define their niches, probably as directed by existing user behaviour, the less likely it becomes that this will happen, since those competitors would blur the definitions of their own niches by doing so.

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.