is a web publishing service that bills itself as "the dead simple place to post everything." Like Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr, and countless others, Posterous is a blogging platform. Unlike others, Posterous focuses on publishing by email.
The subject of your email is the title of the blog post. The body of the email is the content of that post. Once the email is sent, it's instantly published online. In fact, to get started, all a user had to do is email their first blog post to post@posterous.com and a blog is automatically created. Posterous sends an email back confirming that the post has been received and that a new blog has been created. The message includes a link to the new blog and information about optionally setting a password and other options.
What's more is you can attach anything to your email to Posterous. Posterous will convert photos, video, links, documents, and audio files into a web friendly format. For example, if you attach photos to your email, Posterous will resize them for the web and create a spiffy image gallery. This is done automatically when your email is received by Posterous.
Visit Mr. Thompson's Classroom Blog and AP World History for classroom examples of blogs published using Posterous.
Posterous' focus on being "dead simple" is refreshing. While you can stick with simplicity, Posterous websites do have many options. You can invite collaborators, change your blog's appearance, track page views, moderate posts, enable comments, and more.
Posterous can even be used for audio podcasting. Like publishing a blog, you can simply email Posterous with an audio file (like .mp3, .wav, or .m4a). The subject of the email is the title of the episode. The body of the email is the description of the episode.
Without using Posterous, it can be somewhat complicated figure out where to host and publish a podcast. That's because besides a place to store the audio files, a podcast requires a website and a web feed. A web feed (sometimes called an RSS feed) is necessary for subscribing with iTunes. Some teachers are lucky enough to have a podcast server in the district. If not, it's up to the teacher to figure out how to get the podcast published. In the past I've recommended hosting services like Libsyn or podOmatic where you upload your media and fill out a few fields of information. Libsyn then makes a webpage for what you uploaded and updates the web feed.
Unlike Libsyn, Posterous is free of charge. Currently you can use up to 1GB of space, which is enough storage for more than 20 hours of audio and should be plenty for your podcast. I have been using Posterous for my TonyVincent.info podcast. Each episode is a short reflection on what I've learned that day. It's actually recorded and emailed from my iPod touch. You can listen online at tonyvincent.posterous.com. Notice how Posterous includes an audio player so visitors can listen in their web browser.
Listening in a browser is great, but many may want to listen using iTunes. Each Posterous blog has a web feed that can be used to subscribe with iTunes. The feed icon 
is on the blog's main page. Right-clicking the icon and copying the link and then pasting it in iTunes under Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast is one way to subscribe. That is probably too many steps to explain to students, parents, or whomever your audience is. Instead, here's how you set up a one-click subscriptions:
- Create your Posterous account and email your first audio file.
- Go to your Posterous blog and right-click the web feed icon . Copy the feed's URL, which is something like http://yoursite.posterous.com/rss.
- Paste the link into your classroom or school website. Change the http:// to itpc://. The itpc:// tells web browsers to launch iTunes and subscribe to that feed. When visitors click itpc://yoursite.posterous.com/rss the latest episode begins to download and future episodes will be downloaded automatically. Test this out by clicking itpc://tonyvincent.posterous.com/rss.
Blogging and podcasting should not be about the act of putting something online; it should be about communication, and Posterous makes communicating with a blog or podcast as simple as it can get. When publishing is as "dead simple" as sending an email, you can spend your time writing or recording content instead of struggling to get that content online.
