Blogging Platforms

Twitter and Facebook seem strangely complementary; Facebook offers private sharing of text and photographs with friends and family, while Twitter offers public sharing of similar data with strangers holding similar interests. Since these services took off, "traditional" blogging, by which I mean the self-publishing of newspaper-style text and photographs, seems to have slipped from the public eye. Where once the mainstream media would have reported on the "Blogosphere" (horrible term), now the talk is all of Social Media, led by Twitter and Facebook.

That doesn't mean that the bloggers have gone away, of course. They're still around, crafting long-form articles (to varying degrees of success, quality and obscurity) and pushing the subjects that interest them but their media profile has definitely slipped. In part, this is a natural response to the sudden availability of new, faster, more convenient forms of communication, predominantly Twitter, that have enabled a new style of rapid engagement between individuals, governments, companies and other organisations.

This is great. I am a big fan of Twitter and I use it almost daily (not least to publicise my blog posts, which never fail to get at least 1-2 views per week) but what if you want to write pieces longer than 140 characters? For you there are several tools available and I'm going to look briefly at two of them.

First up is Posterous, a relatively new blogging platform, acquired in 2012 by Twitter. Posterous's unique feature is its ability to re-post your blogs to a variety of other social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Tumblr and a huge number of others. You can, with very little effort, distribute your blogs across all the major social media sites, maintaining a distributed presence with little or no effort.

Is this useful? Well, sort of. Posting a link to your blog to Facebook or Twitter is reasonably likely to increase your audience and the integration is mature and successful. Pushing updates to other sites, for example Blogger, works but the end result is less than entirely pleasing because of the way that the updates are formatted, which means your Blogger site fills up with slightly dodgy Posterous updates. Not great.

My preferred option (and I have spent a long time thinking about this) is Blogger, which I have used for about six years. By far the more powerful tool, the only thing it can't do is auto-post to other social media sites. This is a bit of a pain after the convenience of Posterous but salvation arrives in the form of IFTTT, a configurable tool for doing things with your stuff on the Internet. Configuring IFTTT to, for example, post blog links to Twitter or Facebook, is quick and easy, rendering Posterous's most compelling feature redundant and addressing the one hole in Blogger's formidable feature arsenal.

My recommendation, therefore, if you are looking for a blogging platform, is to use Blogger with a side-order of IFTTT; simple, quick, elegant, robust and fun.