I think Posterous has some excellent features going. What it doesn't have is a community feel behind it. I get the feeling that every Posterous blog stands alone. Versus other blogging systems - Tumblr comes to mind - where community is a big part of the fun. That's one of the things that's made Posterous tough to consider as a main platform - that and theming.
Are you a Tumblr user? Because the large part of the community occurs on the Dashboard, through reblogging and passing things along. You get some people who comment back-and-forth, some people who act as nodes for large amounts of content. I'd love to map it: you get a brilliant web built up.
Tumblr isn't about the individual blog community. It's about the Tumblr community. And I like, actually, that when you look at a blog it seems entirely personal, but that from the dashboard it seems like parts of a larger community.
The Tumblr founders are very against comments, and I love that. Comments don't form a community. They add a facade of a community in all but the best cases. Community relies on the form of the medium, and commenting very rarely is the answer. With forums, you have threads; with Tumblr, you have likes, reblogs, and answers. It's a wonderful solution.
The concept of bubbling up conversation to the top level of one's own published blog is fascinating. I didn't quite understand reblogging before reading your explanation, and I think that's the main downside to the scheme, but there is certainly value in making the act of commenting ALSO an act of publishing on one's own blog.
Yeah. It's tough to understand, and sometimes I feel that it detracts from the blog entirely (extended back-and-forth conversations start to look amateur), but it's a very neat system that gives you a lot of freedom in how you choose to handle interaction.
