Ok, so recently the appeal of hosting, managing, and dealing with the hassles of managing my own WordPress blog have gotten to me. And after looking into what lifestream has shifted to from the complete shift of Steve Rubel to Posterous over the past 90 days I’ve decided that the time is right to – soon- move over to using a 3rd party provider to manage my blogging needs.

This is where my precise optimization habit has come into play (Who else uses Colemak as their keyboard to try and squeeze as much productivity as possible out of typing? Not many). Which leads to what I’ve spent the better part of two days doing, comparing on a lot of different levels the relative pros and cons dealing with Posterous vs. Tumblr. Here’s a mind dump of what I like and dislike from each service so far after spending the time looking at the two closely (I haven’t really read any reviews by people on what they think of the service, mostly just the content other people have made and the documentation).

Posterous Pros:

• Auto-post to anywhere no matter what activity I take part in, I can know from a digital presence and findability point of view my content will show up where it needs to.
• The Posterous Reader (www.posterous.com/reader) a very well put together tool, which basically a lot of the same as the Tumblr dashboard, but there’s just something about it that’s very cool.
• Posting of Documents. Posting Word docs, presentations, powerpoints, and PDFs makes it a bit easier to think of Posterous as the final solution I’ll ever need. I’d always choose to share the media directly rather than dealing with anything else besides a one step process.
• Some nice and simple built in analytics plus easy to add GA.
• Built in itunes podcast feed for my posts.
• A better bookmarklet app.
• I can use almost any feature of their service on my smartphone thanks to it all working through email.
• If all the content I send them goes through email, I always have a 2nd copy of the data in case they die.
• Investors like Tim Ferriss and Guy Kawasaki.
• Fast and useful improvements to their product.
• So simple I got my girlfriend doing it.

Posterous Cons:

• There collections of themes is still very sparse.
• They don’t let me use Disqus for my commenting (The default commenting works, but I just want Disqus). Since they don’t enable Javascript, I can’t plug it in using custom theming as well.
• http://posterous.com/people/malcolmbastien sends me to the user account of some guy in California.

Tumblr Pros:

• The fact that Gary Vaynerchuk uses it for www.garyvaynerchuck.com as well as some other cool cats like http://blog.disqus.com/, and http://normativedesign.tumblr.com/, and http://www.patrickglinski.com/
• Beautiful themes
• I can use Disqus commenting (this is big)
• Some interesting post options like: quotes, chats, link
• I get a bit more of a sleek, sophisticated feel from the Tumblr brand.
• Over $5 million in investment makes me a bit more comfortable with their long term life.
• Tumblarity (Many people thinks this sucks mind you. I’m not sure how actually useful it is.)

Tumblr Cons:

• I can’t import my old WordPress content into it.
• The URL structure is annoying with it being “malcolmbastien.com/post/13832450/slug” (compared to malcolmbastien.com/slug – much cleaner)
• The fact that they were started in 2007 but don’t have a WordPress importer (Posterous coincidently can import from WordPress And Tumblr) which is pretty stupid. I was honestly shocked that the service didn’t have this feature (the support person who emailed me sure was nice, even while side stepping why they didn’t develop this feature 3 years ago) . So I’m kind of unsure how they’re currently innovating.
• Last time I tried to upload audio from their iPhone app it never worked.
• If I want to add in GA I have to deal with code. (Posterous has a nice text box field where I just enter my site code)

That’s all I can recollect for now from my thinking and discussions I’ve had so far. I hope you’ve found this useful. I’m going to post this to Posterous and have it auto post to Tumblr. Because you can’t do that the other way around… Le sigh…

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