Myspace is more of a social networking platform than a blog platform; while it does include options to make blog posts, the blog isn’t really front and center when someone browses your profile; it’s more of a line item, one more thing about you that’s shared with friends or with the public at large.

Nevertheless, given the sheer number of people who’ve signed up into Myspace (141 million, according to the “My Network” statistics on signing up), there’re potentially millions of blogs on Myspace. And for a number of casual bloggers, Myspace is likely to be their only “blog”.

Signing up

Myspace has a sign up process that’s more elaborate than the others we tested till now; you need to provide a lot more personal information to get in. While you can skip some parts like the photo upload, basic details including name, location, age and sex are mandatory. This contrasts with Blogger or WordPress where all you need is an email id; but fits in with the personal profiling and social networking intent that drives Myspace. The test blog we set is at http://www.myspace.com/2cworth.

Posting and Customization

The basic blog menu is fairly simple; options to post, view the blog, or customize it.

Creating a post is done through a rich text editor; additional options to keep the post private, allow comments, and show your mood. Customization of the blog itself is limited to changing colors and fonts.

However, there’s another option to customize – through layouts. Many external resources offer layout generators of different types; using these, customizing the look and feel of your profile becomes fairly easy. You can also add pictures, icons and other elements to make your profile stand out.

Social features

Commenting and trackbacks – the two key features that define discussion for blogs – are rather rudimentary for Myspace.

Browsing through the network, there were quite a number of profiles without any blog posts; and the blogs we found tended to have comments turned off. With no spam control tools, and a need to manually delete any spam comments, it’s easier for the casual blogger to avoid comments totally. Trackbacks too don’t seem to be supported – again, a reflection of Myspace’s personal networking focus as opposed to blog focus.

Where Myspace excels in social networking is in searching by demographics; finding people who live in the same area as you, or by age / sex / interest in relationships is a lot easier. But you can’t search by interest, or by topic; Myspace apparently believes that these aren’t important. And perhaps, for their users, it isn’t important.

The other area Myspace excels, is in integrating other communication modes; getting Myspace through your mobile phone, adding your instant messenger, or importing your web email addressbook show up on your dashboard, as soon as you login. For people who are looking to simply their communication options, this is very helpful.

Other features

Myspace has a few other features that caught the eye – forums for discussion, bulletins where you can make announcements to all friends, and a classified ads section that’s reminiscent of Craigslist.

All these interactive features provide a completeness in the experience; while it has nothing to do with blogging, the richness of the experience even within minutes explains why Myspace has been growing membership by leaps and bounds.

At the same time, the rampant growth has also brought spam to Myspace; the ease with which anyone can sign up and create a false profile together with the ease of communicating and building a network, makes it attractive for some who wish to mask their identities for any reason. One joke has it that the latest toy is a Myspace Barbie – an obese 50 year old male masquerading as a blonde 20-something.

Conclusion

As a blog platform, Myspace is nothing to write home about; it just has rudimentary blogging features, only adequate enough to qualify as a blog platform.

The other parts of Myspace – the social networking tools, groups, forums, messaging, etc. – plus the music / videos / bands really define what Myspace is all about. And by integrating a blog, classifieds, and other tools for browsing and searching, Myspace allows you to get a place on the web that’s all about you.

With that intent, the blog serves the intended purpose: for you to quickly add your thoughts and ideas, and share these with a larger group in the context of who you are. Which is probably adequate for a casual blogger.

LiveJournal is a hosted blog solution from SixApart, the same company that also provides TypePad, Movable Type, and a new offering called Vox. SixApart???s web site indicates the focus ??? TypePad and Movable Type being offered for professional and business blogging, Vox for personal blogs ??? and LiveJournal for a community of bloggers.

Not surprisingly, the key highlight of LiveJournal is the ability to form and manage a community of blogs; people who choose to blog on a common set of topics, or share a common background or interests. Whether it???s based on being from the same school, living in the same town ??? or finding new friends around the world, sharing an interest, LiveJournal offers a way to knit your blogs together in a shared space.

Signing up

LiveJournal offers 3 levels of service ??? two free, and one paid option. The basic free service has limited features, but doesn???t have advertising; the plus featured free version requires ads to be placed on the blog.

??

Unlike Xanga where the ad position is fixed, LiveJournal allows you to choose whether top and bottom, sides, or between posts; you also have the option of choosing the categories of ads that you???d prefer to show on your blog.

Signing up is straightforward; you enter a username and your email id, and get an email to activate your account. Once activated, you can modify your profile, and start posting. The test blog we created is at http://2cworth.livejournal.com/.

Posting and editing

Once logged in, the menu offers a variety of choices; the Journal link brings a pull down menu to access posting, editing and customization options. The default edit screen is a text editor; Rich Text and HTML options are also available. The edit screen also has options to add tags, indicate your mood and music choices, as well as whether to allow viewing and commenting to the public at large.

LiveJournal also allows customization of the look and feel; there are 24 choices of themes that can be used. Several external sites also offer themes for LiveJournal. However, some of the themes can only be used with the paid option. You can also customize the style sheet and the fonts through the customization screen.

In addition to the browser based update, LiveJournal also offers email-based, Internet Messaging based updates, plus audio. There???s also a Text Message based update possible from your mobile phone; however, this is currently available to US based members only.

Social Features

In keeping with the community oriented nature of LiveJournal, there are several features that allow for social networking. The starting point is the Profile, where you can list your interests and affiliations, to provide more information about yourself. LiveJournal offers an internal messaging system to enable private email style messaging.

You can choose ???Friends??? from the LiveJournal members; similar to blogrolling, but within the LiveJournal community. You can invite others to become friends, or invite your friends to join LiveJournal.

But by far, the ???community??? option provides the greatest interaction. A community is similar to a group blog, in that any of the community members can contribute to the shared space; the creator of the community has the option to grant or restrict rights to the members, and to have additional administrators / moderators to help direct the community. Take a look at 100poems, or badwriters; different people, coming together, to create a shared experience for themselves and others.

Unlike Blogger or WordPress, where you can engage with anyone outside, LiveJournal is more of a closed community; while you can link to external sites, some of the functionality related to trackbacks and blog style discussion isn???t available. The focus is more on smaller, closer knit internal communities as opposed to the free for all that general blogging provides. Nevertheless, for personal blogging, and where your preference is for closer interaction than for the public stage, LiveJournal is a good option.

Conclusion

LiveJournal, as one of the older blogging platforms, has a sizeable number of users ??? some estimates put it around 2 million or more. With a robust set of features, aimed at fostering small community linkages, LiveJournal attracts a particular type of member, providing a small town-like atmosphere amid the hurly burly of a flat world.

This is an ideal platform for small, non-commercial groups; those seeking to attract a wide audience or to incorporate commercial elements,?? are better off looking elsewhere.

Xanga is one of the older blog platforms around; started in 1998 as a site for sharing book and music reviews, it morphed into a blogging service in 2000. Xanga is one of the most popular blog platforms, with a total number of users estimated at 27 – 40 million. Most of these users are believed to be teenagers or schoolgoers.

Xanga hosts weblogs as well as photo / video blogs; each user gets a “Xanga Site”. Unlike Blogger and WordPress.com which provide subdomain based sitenames, Xanga sitenames are in sub-directory form. The test blog on Blogger was profyposts.blogspot.com; on xanga, the blog url is www.xanga.com/profypost.

Like WordPress, Xanga offers a premium service – for this review, we chose the free version.

Signing up

Xanga’s sign up process was the easiest one so far; just enter your username, email address, and you’re ready to go. The initial screen provides an opportunity to update your profile; but if you’d rather skip it, you go straight to the post entry screen. Just two minutes after sign-up, the first post was up and published!

Posting and Editing

By default, Xanga activates the rich text editor; for novices, this is by far the easiest option. There is an alternate rich text editor as well as a plain text / HTML edit option, accessible from the settings menu. Creating a post is quite simple. The editor also provides options to upload photos, audio and video; add tags, enable or disable commenting, and keeping the posts private.

Customizing look and feel

After the rich variety in WordPress, Xanga came across as a poor cousin; for the free service, the options to customize are limited to changing the colors of the background and text, using a header, and fonts. HTML and Javascript inserts are allowed, but this can  be daunting for a novice.

Paid users are allowed much more flexibility; Xanga Skins are available from other sites, and can be freely used.

Other features

Here, Xanga beats WordPress hollow; against the 50 MB allowed in WordPress, the free version of Xanga allows upto 1 GB of uploads. Premium users have more, including a Premium Plus option that offers unlimited space.

Xanga gives you the option to restrict viewership to other Xanga members, or leave it open to all; in a random check of recently updated sites listed on the Xanga home page, we found many users appear to restrict access. Commenting is also restricted to Xanga users only. Xanga also has “eprops”, which allows viewers to give bonus points to posts that they like.

In addition to comments and eprops, two other elements distinguish Xanga’s blog posting offering.

1)  Users can provide ratings to the content, with a rating system similar to movie ratings – Xanga allows a “safe mode” browsing, so that inappropriate content can be filtered.

2)  There’s also an option to show a “Currently listening to music” or “Reading a book”, sharing your activity with the world.

Advertising

Xanga’s free offering is ad-supported – Google Ads and banners appear on most pages. Consequently, unlike Blogger which allows you to earn from your blog, Xanga doesn’t permit any kind of commercial use. WordPress.com on the other hand, doesn’t use advertisements, or permit them either, for the most part – there are exceptions, but as a rule, you won’t see any commercial elements on the hosted blogs on WordPress.com.

Social Networking

Xanga encourages two kinds of networks: Blogrings and Metros.  Blogrings are groups of blogs linked by commonality of interest such as particular artists or activities. Metros are geographical; it allows you to link up with people living near you. However, neither of these has the flexibility of blogrolling.

Users can also provide profiles, with information on themselves as well as profile pictures. Profiles allow the ability to connect with friends, and to search for others. Xanga also allows tracking options that enable users to see who visited their blog, as well as geotracking of anonymous users.

Conclusion

The free version of Xanga is reasonably novice friendly; however, the restrictions on customizing the look and feel did leave us feeling unsatisfied, preferring either Blogger or WordPress.com. At the same time, the large space allocation is a powerful attraction, especially if you’re looking to use photos, music and videos as part of your blog. Not surprisingly, Xanga blogs tend to be more multimedia oriented than text, attracting the younger generation.
 

Blogger is one of the oldest blog platforms around, whereas WordPress is among the newer ones. Nevertheless, WordPress has been gaining users and popularity; part of it may be due to the free / open source nature of the offering, but the range of features coupled with the ease of use is probably a key driver.
This review is based on testing the free hosted service at WordPress.com, not the software download at WordPress.org that’s used for self-hosted sites. Technically, there are differences; WordPress.com runs the multi-user version (WordPress MU) and not the standard version. From a user standpoint, the two are very similar; we’ll cover the differences in a subsequent review of self hosted platform offerings.

Starting off

Signing up for a WordPress.com blog is simple – enter your username and email address to sign up. You get an email that asks you to activate your blog; once activated, another email gives you the signup password. While it doesn’t have the instant start that Blogger does, the responses are fairly fast; both emails completed within 10 minutes. The subsequent test post / test blog was completed within 5 minutes.

Customizing your blog

Once you login, the startup screen shows news from WordPress.com and featured blogs; the menu bar on top lets you access your blog. The first screen highlights the most commonly used options – changing your profile and account details, going to the dashboard, or writing a new post.

The dashboard here provides more options than the Blogger dashboard – the number of menu items is reflective of the additional capabilities that WordPress provides; you can select themes, manage your posts and comments, create categories and links (blogroll), add users, and more.

Out of the box, WordPress.com provides over 50 themes for you to choose; plus, options to add sidebar “widgets” that add more features / capabilities including featuring top posts, recent posts, categories, archives, Flickr photos and more. You also can edit most themes to select colors or change part of the look through customized CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

Posting and Editing

By default, WordPress.com activates the text based editor, which also allows you to add HTML code; the visual rich editor has to be activated by user choice, but lets you get away with not bothering with HTML. You have options to upload photos, specify categories, place trackbacks, choose whether to allow comments and pings, and whether you want to password protect particular posts.

The plethora of options doesn’t mean that it’s unfriendly, or difficult to use. By default, most of these are set to what you’d normally use; changing these are through point-and-click as required. A novice can choose to ignore all these choices without getting into trouble, or choosing to experiment without disastrous consequences.

Other features

WordPress.com also supports multi-user blogs.  Four levels of users are allowed – Contributors, Authors, Editors and Administrators. Contributors and Authors have lower levels of access – they can provide comments and content, but not publish these. Editors approve other users’ content, as well as publish their own. Administrators have the power to change the status of any user.

WordPress.com allows unlimited posts and comments; photos and other file uploads are restricted to 50 MB for the free version. Paid options are also available, providing greater space as well as ability to customize themes and upload your own.

Spam control is another good feature; WordPress.com supports the Akismet plug-in, as well as blacklists by spam words and open proxies.

WordPress.com also provides capability to import from Blogger or Typepad, or export your blog to xml format for upload on a self hosted blog. You can also point your domain or subdomain to WordPress; useful for people who want their own domain without the trouble of learning to operate a hosting account.

Restrictions

With all the extra functionality that WordPress.com provides, there still are some restrictions in place as compared to Blogger.  Adsense or other advertising are not permitted; nor can you use Payperpost or other affiliate links.

Clicktrackers and any promotion of the “I made a million on the internet and so can you” type of advertising are expressly forbidden.

We have a very low tolerance for blogs created purely for search engine optimization or commercial purposes, machine-generated blogs, and will continue to nuke them, so if that’s what you’re interested in WordPress.com is not for you.

Conclusion

WordPress.com is a good choice for any blogger seeking a hosted solution; for novices, it’s easy to use, similar to Blogger; for advanced users, the range of choices and additional functionality vis a vis Blogger makes it a better choice. At the same time, the ease of  migrating to a self hosted site makes it flexible; you aren’t locked in by the limitations of the hosted solution. And because it’s free, it doesn’t pinch your pocket either.

On the other hand, if you don’t mind the costs involved, but do want to monetize your blog, WordPress.com isn’t the right place for you.

For many people, it’s a no-brainer; if you want to blog, you need to go to Blogger. Founded by Pyra in 1999, Blogger was one of the earliest blog platforms; a combination of ease of use, no-fees with an ad-supported business model, and word of mouth made it an automatic choice. Google bought it over in 2002, and has continued to make it accessible freely, with options to integrate Adsense in your blog.

Blogger has undergone several updates over the years; even now, there’s an update underway, currently in beta. Several changes in place, addressing old limitations such as categorization, dynamic page serving instead of static HTML; but it still remains less powerful than other platforms like WordPress or Typepad. More on this below; but if you want to jump the gun, check out the summary on Blogger.

Nevertheless, Blogger has one POWERFUL advantage: simplicity and ease of use. For a novice, who doesn’t want to learn web programming or customization, but is just looking for an easy way to get started, Blogger is reassuring; if you’ve used web-based email and a browser, you can use Blogger. This review focuses on the centrally hosted variant, with a name like yourblog.blogspot.com – we’ll cover the self-hosted variant in a later review.

Getting started :

There’s a 3 – stage process to getting started

• You register for an account with an email id, or login with an existing Google account.
• Next, you choose the name for your blog, and the blogspot name. This is one place where you may have a delay; most good names you’d think of are likely to have been taken already.
• After selecting the name, you select the template you’d like to use for your blog; Blogger offers 12 upfront, plus lets you know that you can customize it or use any other if you want to, later.

That’s it. You’re now ready to start posting if you wish to; you’ll have your blog up and running in minutes.

Customization :

You have options for changing your template, setting commenting options, choosing between full and partial feeds, and adding Adsense – these come through the menus available.

There are several places where you can find templates for a Blogger blog; some of these provide greater customization and functionality, but at a cost; you need to get into the HTML markup. Check out Blogger Templates, or Free Templates - both are hosted on Blogspot, and can give you an idea of the capabilities you can add through customization.

In the earlier version of blogger, anything else needed you to get into the template had to be hard coded; the new beta adds Page Elements such as link lists (or Blogrolls, as it’s commonly referred to), labels (or categories) and feeds. Support for third-party Page Elements is also offered.

The beta version also offers two other upgrades to address enthusiasts:

Dynamic page serving, where the content is pulled from a database and integrated with the template on the fly, rather than the old static html publishing that the regular version provides. However, this is available only on blogspot; not supported on self-hosted domains.

Support for RSS 2.0 is also added, but the default feeds are still Atom based.

Where Blogger lags behind :

Several areas related to social networking are still primitive in Blogger; while it won’t deter a novice, it does show up as a significant lack to a more advanced blogger.

Commenting is one such area; the default settings are for registered blogger users, all others show up as “Anonymous”. Comment moderation and spam comment control is again an “all or nothing” approach; while there is a captcha option, you still have to manually moderate all comments, or let everything through.

Social bookmarking and pinging is another feature that’s practically non-existent. The new beta’s just added “category” functionality; tagging technorati style, or one-click add to the bookmarking engines like del.icio.us or dig isn’t there. While you could add it manually, the fatigue factor involved means that very few Blogger users would use it in any meaningful way. Trackbacks are also rudimentary.

Blogger by default allows only one ping – to weblogs.us. Technorati seems to have worked its own way of tracking blogspot blogs, but given the rich ping functionality available through other platforms, this sticks out like a sore thumb.

Other features :

Blogger includes support for blogging through email, or from a mobile phone; photos and videos are also supported, either from external links or uploaded.

Multi-Author blogs are also supported – the owner of the blog can add other Blogger users as authors.

Multiple blogs are allowed – any registered user can add as many blogs as he or she chooses to.

Conclusion :

Blogger serves well as a beginner platform; ease of use is the key. Certainly, anyone with minimal internet skills can be up and blogging in less than half an hour or so; the test blog at Profyposts on Blogspot was set up in about 10 minutes.

And for a novice user, the lack of functionality doesn’t become a pain point; rather, the simplicity it enables means that they don’t have to go through a long learning process before they can get started. Some third party solutions like Blogrolling help to mitigate the lack of functionality built in; you can find work-arounds that provide some relief.

Blogger’s weaknesses show up when your need is really around

• Robust commenting and user interaction
• Need to integrate your blog with other site functionality, such as forums or CMS software
• Monetising your blog – enabling ecommerce, or other such.

All these are requirements which a serious blogger or webmaster would have; if the need is only for a casual, personal blog which you share with friends, Blogger’s a good choice.

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.

Given that mobile phones outnumber PC’s, and many people expect that it would be the preferred way to access the web for most casual users, it does make sense to focus on such applications.

However, in the light of a recent announcement of an alliance from Sun, Nokia and Ericsson, as well as the skimpy nature of information on the site itself, it looks like a rushed decision. Surprisingly, apart from the brief copyright tagline below, there’s very little indication of the Microsoft involvement on the front page – and with just 12 mashups listed including a cryptically named “One More Service” which returns a 404 error when clicked, it does seem like a botched kick-off. Interestingly enough, Firefox works better with this site than Internet Explorer does!

General IT lore has it that Microsoft gets the act together only by the third iteration; this offering seems to validate the old story.

To quote fellow blogger Delta

Google also probably guessed that they were about to take on board a huge legal fight that would probably cost them billions more than the $1.65 billion that the company, YouTube cost them.

Here’s the reality. The acquisition was an all-stock deal; Google didn’t pay any cash, just released additional stock. Let’s take a look at Google’s stock price and market capitalization.

Early October, before the announcement, Google was trading between $400 and $425 – giving a market capitalization of between $120 to $130 billion.

Shortly after the deal was announced, the price has gone up – it’s been hovering between $480 and $513, which puts the market capitalization between $145 and $153 billion.

That’s a jump of over $25 billion – and looks like an estimation of what the market thinks Google + YouTube, i.e. the acquisition is worth.

Spend $1.65 billion to get $25 billion? Sure makes sense to me.

Of course, Google’s been buying more – Jotspot and so on. So maybe it isn’t all of the $25 billion. 5, 10, 20 – you pick your number. Even then, it sure is a heck of a deal.

Azeem Azhar looks at historical trends in business and industry, to trace what’s been happening. From the early days of the industrial revolution, business organization has been evolving; early partnerships giving way to joint stock companies, culminating in the vertically integrated industrial organizations like the automotive industry, or the horizontal conglomerates with fingers in all pies.

Part of this was driven by the lack of independent resources; as technology emerged, the slow rate at which it was disseminated out was driven partly by the “control and command” need; but also by the fact that there weren’t enough alternative options who could independently drive development. Even IT and the Web, which we like to think of as being far more disaggregated, started off under the aegis of IBM and the Defense Department’s Arpanet.

One of the outcomes of sustained development over the last century, has been the leveling of the resource field; to the point where the ubiquity of resources makes it possible for multiple alternate options. Costs of transacting with other organizations have diminished, not only because of ubiquitous communication but also the fact that inherent competition drives efficiency all through the value chain.

Azeem quotes the tendency to disaggregation in many areas of industry, not just the Web, to postulate that the perception of the Web 2.0 bubble ignores the reality that the same kind of shift holds true across a wide range of activities.

And that we’re witnessing a fundamental shift in organization dynamics; from the top-down, control driven structure of the past, to the fluid, self-organizing, need and coordination driven structure that so permeates Web 2.0.

David Chartier over at Downloadsquad sets out to fill the gap – a user perspective on what he likes or doesn’t like. While some of it may seem tongue in cheek, a lot of it makes sense.

These days it seems like anyone with an idea and some time can crank out a Web 2.0 startup, be it a service, community, one-trick-pony or ambiguously named whichamadinger. It also seems like many of these startups could use some guidance to help them find their way. With goofy names, varying user experiences and questionable goals running amok, we figured it was time to lay down some ground rules.

Seven simple rules, about making it easy for the user. Keeping it simple and easy to use, providing the right kind of information upfront for prospects to evaluate – and getting a sensible name, along with other sensible inputs.

Judging from the comments, this is something many people empathise with. Certainly, a lot of this makes sense, and not just for Web 2.0

One more, to rule them all.

Listen to your users; where you can, let them make the rules