December 19th, 2009 | By: Garin Kilpatrick

Tumblr and Posterous are two of the easiest and most powerful blogging platforms on the net, and that makes them awesome. In this post I am going to examine the commonalities, strengths, and weaknesses of each platform so that you can decide if either (or both) are right for you.

Tumblr

Tumblr has been around since 2007, and is based out of New York. Tumblr has been able to attract some high profile Bloggers such as Katy Perry and Gary Vaynerchuck.  These Bloggers, combined with a well designed iPhone app have helped the platform generate over a million bloggers.

Tumblr has a unique community that features both types of bloggers; content creators, and content sharers. The average Tumblr Blog has more shared, than created, content. The reblog feature of tumblr has encourages sharing, by simplifying it into a single click, much like how the new retweet button of Twitter works. Tumblr blogs imitate twitter, in how they have a follow feature, and twitter even has a tumblr blog for status.twitter.com.

Tumblr supports auto-posting to Twitter with the custom url service http://tumblr.com/

Custom Domains

Tumblr supports custom domains. Configuring a tumblr to use your custom domain simply requires changing your ip address with your registrar to tumblrs ip. I did this in less than five minutes for my Canadian tumblr blog at garin.ca. The default tumblr domain naming system goes: www.yourdomain.tumblr.com. I was lucky enough to snatch up www.garin.tumblr.com and I use this as my main tumblr blog, and I use it for sharing cool content I find around the web.

Themes

Tumblr has a variety of Themes, and it helps to have a theme with built in reblog abilities. If you want to install a disqus commenting system to your blog, this is also possible, however I have noticed that comment engagement is very low with tumblr.

Strength

Tumblr has an iPhone App that allows you to post to your tumblr blog, view your dashboard, or adjust settings.

Weakness

Email Posting is offered with tumblr, but it involves a unique email address that is largely random and not easy to remember.  I do not know my custom tumblr email address and I don’t make an effort to remember it since posterous simplifies this process.

Posterous

Posterous has the motto the dead simple way to blog and that statement is not misleading. Posterous simplifies blogging by allowing posts to be made via email, or on the web. Most people use posterous by emailing posts to post@posterous.com, then posterous responds by posting the email with the corresponding posterous and then sending a return email notifying the sender that the post was made. Posterous allows users to subscribe to other posterous blogs.

Auto posting to Twitter is supported and Posterous uses the shortening url service http://post.ly/ to append urls.

Custom Domains

Posterous supports custom domains, and offers step by step instructions, if your registrar is godaddy, for adjusting your ip address to point to posterous. The default url for posterous is www.yourdomain.posterous.com and since I was happy with my url www.garin.posterous.com I saw no need to use a custom domain.

Themes

Posterous does not have the theme selection like tumblr does, but they do make it rather simple to customize the colors, and offer a few themes.  They also offer advanced themes for those who want easy access to the css and html so that the design can be seriously modified.

Strengths

With posterous email posting is simplified, by having a users posterous account linked with their email account.

Commenting is integrated as soon as you set up your posterous, and allows for people to login with posterous, facebook, or twitter to comment on your post.

Another Posterous strength is support for auto posting from posterous to a variety of other sites, such as facebook, twitter, flickr, delicious, and more.

Weakness

The weakness of posterous is that it is new and still has a relatively small community.  This is an advantage for some bloggers since many of the popular posterous domains have not yet been claimed.

Posterous has no iPhone App, but the only reason why they don’t is because they really don’t need one, since posting is done through email.

Conclusion

Both Tumblr and Posterous are great ways to blog.  If you want to share I recommend Tumblr, whereas if you want to post via email Posterous is the way to go.  Let me know what your favorite is in the comments below, and include your blog url if you have one!

Tags: blog platform, blogging, posterous, tumblr