Posterous

Posterous is a free, easy-to-use blogging platform that lets users post by e-mail. You can post everything from PDF files to videos to the site just by e-mailing them to post@posterous.com. The site has a lot of potential for crowdsourcing or for organizing content from many contributors in a breaking news environment.

Posting by e-mail isn't a new feature by any means (Typepad, Blogger, etc.). And posterous isn't a tool that you would want to use to run a general blog for your newsroom by any means, but it has some extra features that may have some added value in a breaking news environment or to organize content around a developing story from several contributors.

Features

What differentiates Posterous from other blogging clients is its ability to handle so many different types of files with very little effort from the user.

You can send Posterous image files, videos, PDFs, sound files, just about anything you can think of and it will convert them to a Web-friendly format and post them for you. That means that you could send posterous sound files and it would convert them and attach them to your posts, and therefore your RSS feed, giving you a podcast.

Also unlike many blogging platforms, Posterous integrates with Twitter, Facebook and other applications to allow you to update several sites at once — another useful thing if you're trying to get developing information out.

And to get information from several sources all you have to do is add your contributors' email addresses to your settings in Posterous and their content will automatically start to show as well.

You can do the same thing for cell phones. Just add a phone number to your account and the text messages to Posterous will start to pop up on your blog. That's a great option when you're trying to get information out and you don't have an Internet connection handy.

Downside

The biggest downside right now is that posterous doesn't allow you to customize the look and feel of your blog, which is a crucial feature if you're wanting to use it as your main newsroom blog. Keep checking back, though, as those features are coming soon.

Performance

I tried Posterous and e-mailed a few photos, a video and a text snippet and quickly received an e-mail telling me that a Posterous blog had been created for me and instructing me how to go to the site and manage the blog if I wanted to. By the time I opened the link it had sent me to my new post the video had already been converted and the photos were already in a slideshow.