Blogspot v. WordPress.com, Blogger v. WordPress

Blogspot Does Not Scale With My Life at A Fool’s Wisdom

My comments:

Blogspot isn’t perfect and WordPress is quite good. But Blogger beta does have some redeeming qualities, including category-like labels. The advantage these labels have over WP categories is that labels can be sorted by frequency instead of being listed alphabetically. Also, you can simply type a comma-separated list of keywords and these will be added as labels. The full list of labels is available but it’s hidden by default. With WordPress.com, adding categories can be an issue. It actually takes time to do on my decent DSL connection. In terms of basic reasoning, WP categories are really categories (you classify posts). Blogger’s labels are more like labels, tags, or keywords: you specify what your post connects with.
While it’s true that Blogger beta doesn’t have an export feature yet, other blogging systems should be able to import Blogger entries, once the new APIs are released. In fact, the cool way to do it, IMHO, is to use a standalone editor like ecto to repurpose your posts. Since the new APIs for Blogger haven’t been released, ecto can’t download Blogspot entries, but it’s certainly going to be a possibility quite soon.
Since Blogger accounts are quite common, commenting on somebody else’s blog can bring more comments to your own blog. WP.com tries to do the same thing and the tag surfer is quite cool, but so far comment traffic on my blog has been very low.
The other thing that is nice about Blogger is that, contrary to WordPress.com, it’s not a simplified version of a full package. WordPress makes a visible effort to add functionalities to WP.com (WP MU) but it’s still meant as a way to push people into WP. Installing WordPress is very easy and anyone with server space should use it on their own server. (That’s what we do for our <a href=”http://blog.criticalworld.net/”>academic blog</a>.) But for those who don’t have server space, WP.com can be slightly frustrating as the documentation, forums, community, plugins, and neater features are really meant for your own WP installation.
Now, don’t get me wrong. WP.com has been quite nice to me in the past few months. In fact, my main reason to move from WP.com to Blogger would be if my Blogger/Blogspot blog got more comments than my WP.com one. Otherwise, unless Blogger comes with very compelling features (like integration with Google Measure Map, Calendar, Spreadsheet, Writely, Gmail, etc.), my WP.com blog will remain my active blog.

Thanks for your comment on my blog!!

15 thoughts on “Blogspot v. WordPress.com, Blogger v. WordPress”

  1. Do you publish multiple blogs? Which one gives you the best functionality for managing multiple blogs from a single interface?

  2. I do post on multiple blogs: one on WordPress.com, a collaborative one on self-hosted WordPress, and three on Blogspot, including a collaborative blog. Blogspot seems better than WordPress.com at managing multiple blogs from a single interface but I haven’t tried handling multiple blogs on self-hosted WordPress or on WordPress.com.

  3. Thatched,
    I actually have never tried working with Drupal. It does sound powerful and I wouldn’t be surprised that it’d do wonders with multi-blogging. What kind of tweaking do you find yourself needing to do?

  4. I’ll clarify to say it’s more about finding and applying other people’s tweaks. But, by way of example, if you want to include images in your RSS feed (something both WordPress and Blogger do automatically) you’d have to create a custom module and install that. Fortunately there’s a large community of people doing these things in a professional capacity.

  5. Sounds a bit much for the casual blogger but quite useful for those whose lives are focused on blogging.
    That’s actually part of what I was thinking about when I originally wrote this entry. Free blog hosts like Blogspot and WordPress.com have very few modules and customization options but they do simplify things for people like me who don’t want to spend a lot of time configuring things or playing with modules. Drupal module development might be very active, given the number of people who use Drupal as a full-featured Content Management System, but I quite like those pre-packaged blogging solutions.
    OTOH, I do wish I had my own server to play around with WordPress plugins and such.

  6. And/or MeasureMap. At this point, more precise statistics seem to be the main thing which is lacking from WordPress.com (apart from podcasting support).

  7. Yes, I’ve got 2 blogs on WordPress and Blogger.
    The new blogger is more simple. But i think wordpress.org (the server WP) is cool too!
    plus, it’s been two weeks i’ve created my blog and I Digg my posts as well and I have visitors from all around the world. But nobody has ever left a single comment on my page for God’s sake!

  8. @Douglas It all depends on what you need. WordPress.com does a decent job at statistics, links between blogs on the same platform, etc. I personally like some things about the interface as well as some of the secondary features. The high visibility isn’t too much of an advantage for me, but it’s kind of fun. The recent upgrade (related to the WP 2.5 upgrade) had some positive effects, despite some awkwardness (no word count?).
    I like Blogger too but I tend to gravitate toward WordPress.com more.

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