Tag Archives: blog categories

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!!