Mini Review Series - Blog Platforms

For all the hype that follows YouTube, Flickr and other new Web 2.0 offerings, the biggest Web 2.0 success story has really been weblogs and blogging. A report on Technorati talks about the explosive growth; the number of blogs today is over a 100 times what it’s been 3 years ago, with the size doubling every 200 days or so. Yet, the Technorati count of 55 million excludes spam blogs, and others that don’t exactly meet their criteria as being blogs.

The Blog Herald back in July estimated the number of blogs at over 70 million; there again, that excludes Myspace, which in addition to the “personal homepage” option does have blog like capabilities. Not to mention Microsoft’s claim that Windows Live Spaces is now the largest blogging service, with over 30 million members.

Other estimates consider the number of blogs to be over 100 million; and this could be an underestimate, too; it depends on what you define as a blog. If the definition is driven by the platform or the provider, as most of the above do, it does capture a large part; yet, it excludes sites which do have the characteristics of a blog but because of manual management, or being part of a larger site, get overlooked.

So what is a blog? And what are blog platforms?

Wikipedia defines it as

A blog is a website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order.
…
Early weblogs were simply manually updated components of common websites. However, the evolution of tools to facilitate the production and maintenance of web articles posted in said chronological fashion made the publishing process feasible to a much larger, less technical, population. Ultimately, this resulted in the distinct class of online publishing that produces blogs we recognize today. For instance, the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of “blogging”. Blogs can be hosted by dedicated blog hosting services, or they can be run using blog software, such as WordPress, blogger or LiveJournal, or on regular web hosting services, such as DreamHost.

Another definition comes from Robert Scoble

Here’s the five things that blogging is:1) Easy to do. Type in a box and hit publish.
2) Discoverable. Through search engines. IE, public.
3) Social. I can track when you link to me from another domain, either through search engines, through trackbacks, or through my referer logs.
4) Permalinkable. I can send you a link directly to a post.
5) Syndicatable. I can use a news aggregator to read your content, which lets me read a lot more blogs.Don’t have one of those five things? You aren’t a blog. Period. Not up for discussion.

One of the key drivers to the explosive growth of blogs and blogging, has been the availability of blog platforms and software; making the process of blogging easy. In contrast, if blogging were dependent on knowing HTML or other web code, and needing to manually do every one of the small tasks that a blogger takes for granted, I doubt if we’d see this kind of growth. Just imagine if you had to rewrite the links to the front page, or manually ping indexing services, or even do the trackback by yourself; would you as a blogger keep up with all this?

Today, there are a variety of blog platforms available for use, for free or for a fee; with options for centrally hosted or self hosted, customization and modification. Quite a number of these are fairly well known names, with each having adherents claiming that their choices is superior.

Here at Profy, we’re setting out to do a set of mini-reviews of these platforms; we’ll be covering Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad / Movable Type / Livejournal, Xanga, Windows Live Spaces and Myspace as being the most commonly used. The primary focus is on ease of use; not just for creating a blog alone, but also for administering and promoting the blog.

No review can hope to cover all the myriad elements that any platform provides, and still be succinct; we’ll be hitting the highlights here, but do welcome readers to contribute any additional views through the comments. Starting here; we believe the above list of blog platforms should be representative, but if we’ve missed anything, do let us know.