If you had told me a year ago that I would soon be composing the bulk of my blog posts in a lowly bookmarklet I’d have never believed you — yet with a few notable exceptions this is exactly what I’ve been doing since mid-August.
Early on I wrote in defence of my auto-posting from Posterous. Today I’m here with a progress report.
In terms of hits, my WordPress.com blog of three years averages a very respectable 300 page views per day, thank-you very much — at least, according to the built-in statistical tools there. About the same number of readers see my stuff on Posterous each day, although I’ve no idea how this number is conjured up — does it include the auto-posts to other blogging engines?
About the multiple blogs, neither my Blogger or Tumblr sites seem to be getting any more traffic than they did before, but I’m keeping both for now — Blogger because I can export my content from there, and Tumblr for its support of Disqus, the external commenting service.
That’s currently my biggest gripe with Posterous… I don’t mind that my content is locked up there, because with auto-posting to Blogger and WordPress.com it’s really not. But the links auto-posted to Facebook, Twitter et al send people back right back here to Posterous, where they’re most likely to comment and where I can’t currently export those comments to reclaim as my own.
Looking forward, the eventual business plan for Posterous seems fairly obvious — despite the promise of providing more free storage as users need it, at some point they’ll inevitably have to start charging for the necessary server space to host all those photos, videos, documents, etc.
Nobody asked me but I think their best bet for the future is to add an email hosting service and become the next generation standard-bearer for web hosting companies. Once they free up the comments on my Posterous blog, of course…
Andrew Currie 