An Experiment in Cross-Posting
For the next few weeks I am going to cross post to WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr and LiveJournal. I'm not going to do any clever analysis of the platforms, but I am going to take notice of something far more difficult to describe or explainhow much I like each place as a destination for my writing.
To provide some perspective when I come to look back, it would be worth recording my feelings about each platform right nowto see if the view has changed a month from now; Wordpress notice that the wordpress blog has a different URL than the othersthis is because I once had one with the same name, but WordPress never lets you re-use a blog name. I like WordPress for two main reasonsthe community is pretty great at WordPress.com, and the HTML of generated blogs is very clean. The only negative is perhaps that many blogs at WordPress.com tend to be for products, or serviceswhich in turn causes spam, or followers who are only following to attract re-follows. Blogger really not sure what the future holds for Blogger. It's owned by Google, and they have become somewhat famous for pulling the plug on properties that have no obvious future path. Blogger hasn't been actively developed for years, and it showsthat being said, it allows more freedom than WordPress. People using it (and discoverable via the profile pages if you disable the Google+ integration) tend to be traditional bloggers tootelling their daily story, rather than marketing something. Tumblrhttp://farflungfriend.tumblr.comI love Tumblr. The many and varied problems it has are almost completely outweighed by the amazing community of people posting to it. My only real concern about Tumblr is the lack of tools allowing you to export, or organise your content. It would be nice to have a good comment system too, but I guess comments are rapidly going the way of the dodoeven the new Ghost blogging platform has no comment feature, and no plans for one. LiveJournalhttp://farflungfriend.livejournal.comI had a LiveJournal account about a decade ago, and almost completely forgot about it until the movie “The Social Network” jogged my memory. It's a dinosaur compared to the other popular platforms, but it can also do things that none of the others canlike “friends only” posts. There is a wonderful community of LiveJournal stalwarts that share the story of their day, and take advantage of the privacy controls to tell far more honest, and raw stories than you might find elsewhere.
I'm hoping that my thoughts will turn away from the technology, or the platforms, or semantically correct HTML, to people, stories, lives and community. I'm hoping the experiment will connect me with new friends.
Only time will tell.