Starting a blog is quite easy: you simply choose the platform (WordPress, Blogger or LiveJournal, for example), pick a title and start writing. You can blog about any topic you like, or use it as a kind of personal diary to express your inner thoughts and feelings – always bearing in mind that this is all publicly available, of course.
But if you feel too lazy to write more than two paragraphs and don’t want all the hassle of having to create a user accounts, use an online editor and fiddle with weird codes every time you want to link to a photo or video you like, try Posterous instead. Posterous is a perfect example of micro-blogging, a variety of blogs we mentioned a while ago whose main characteristic is simplicity. Rather than publishing long posts after a long research of several different sources, micro-blogging focuses on quick posts, almost like Twitter messages, only with multimedia support and no character limit.
Among the dozen different micro-blogging services you can use, Posterous stands out for its ease to use. First, you don’t need to create a user account. Second, you can publish posts by email. And last but not least, you can user a really handy bookmarklet to share photos, videos, online documents and much more.
So, all you have to do to start using Posterous is: send your first post by email to post@posterous.com. The system will immediately reply to you with a temporary domain name and the link to your newly created posterous. You can then visit the website, protect it with a password, pick a subdomain and configure some settings.
I liked Posterous for many reasons: it’s one of the easiest micro-blogging services I’ve ever seen (that bookmarklet is simply gorgeous!), it’s great to share stuff with family and friends (by creating a shared posterous with multiple editors) and can also be protected from prying eyes by marking it as private. So if you’ve always wanted all the advantages of having a blog, but without the hard work, don’t think it twice and create your posterous now! Meanwhile, you can always check mine out…
