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Notes: 1 / 1 week ago
The Great Blog CMS Showdown: Wordpress vs Tumblr vs Posterous
Although I have been extremely happy with the use of Tumblr as my blogging platform I can’t help but feel a little jealous of the Wordpress users and their never ending supply of free themes and plugins to enhance the look and functionality of their blogs. Lately I have been thinking of leaving Tumblr and going back to running my own self hosted Wordpress blog but in order to decide if moving my blog from Tumblr elsewhere would serve my needs best I decided to do a little pro and con comparison between the more well known blogging sites of Wordpress.com, Wordpress.org, Tumblr and Posterous.
Wordpress.com is the commercial half of Wordpress.org and is a fantastic blogging solution for anyone looking to get into blogging. It gives users the power of the Wordpress CMS while taking away the hassle of upgrading the Wordpress software. The downfall of this system is it costs you if you wish to use a custom domain name or your own CSS for styling your site.
Pros
- Easy to set up account (takes under 5 minutes)
- Runs the powerful CMS Wordpress
- Choose from 81 different available themes
- Can activate the ability to use a mobile theme when users visit using a mobile browser
- Widget support
- Change themes with the click of a button
- No hosting costs as bandwidth is covered by Wordpress.com
- Free to use, unless you choose to purchase upgrades
- 3 GB of file hosting
- No maintenance or upgrading of software is required
Cons
- Must pay to edit the CSS of your theme at a price of 14.97 per year
- Costs 9.97 per year to use a custom domain
- Have to pay to remove ads from your site
- Only Wordpress.com is allowed to run advertising on your blog. Only special case sites are allowed to run any advertising besides what Wordpress.com already runs.
- Limited to only the themes they provide
- Limited to using only the widgets that have been pre-selected by Wordpress
- No plugin support
- Admin suite could be seen as overly complex for some users not familiar with a CMS
Wordpress.org is the freely available open source software that powers many of the world’s largest blogs and while very powerful and customizable with its thousands of free and premium themes and plugins it does require that you have your own hosting and are comfortable either installing the software yourself or paying someone else to install and configure it for you.
Pros
- Thousands of free and premium themes to choose from
- Thousands of great plugins and widgets to enhance the usability and feature set of your blog
- Open source so you can make changes to the software as you see fit
- Easy to install on most servers. Many hosting plans include a one click install for Wordpress
- Wordpress is more than just blogging software and can be used as a really powerful CMS
- Can import your old blog into Wordpress with one click
- Spam protection on comments from the Akami plugin
- You can set up your blog to accept multiple authors
- Automatic pinging
- Large community and well documented so you can find answers to most questions quickly
Cons
- Requires that you have web hosting
- Must be comfortable FTPing files and creating a database on your host so that you can install the software
- Some security flaws due to poorly coded plugins
- Admin suite could be seen as overly complex for some users not familiar with a CMS
- Must always ensure to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress to ensure your software contains the latest security fixes
- Plugins must be upgraded to ensure they have the latest security fixes and features
- Upgrading to the latest version of Wordpress could break your theme or plugins
- If something goes wrong you are the site admin and must take care of the issue by searching for the answer
I currently host my blog on Tumblr and find it to be an extremely easy to use micro-blogging platform that is not only free to use but allows for a great amount of customization. The Tumblr admin panel is broken up into categories that make it easy to decide where to place your content but this simplicity comes at a price as you do not get storage space and the expandability afforded with Wordpress plugins is missing. Premium theme development seems to be missing with Tumblr as well making it difficult to find a developer willing to create custom themes for you.
Pros
- Free to use
- Account setup is quick
- Custom domain hosting for free
- Admin area is extremely easy to use
- Theme support and template customization
- Well written API
- Great social media features such as Like, Reblog and Follow
- No maintenance or upgrading of software is required
- Auto-post to your Facebook and Twitter feeds
- Hosted by Tumblr so no additional hosting costs
Cons
- No built in commenting system
- No file hosting
- Can’t install or configure plugins for additional features
- Have had speed issues
- Not a large selection of freely available themes to choose from
- Almost no premium themes to choose from and hard to find developers who do custom themes
- To customize your theme you must be familiar with html/css/javascript
Posterous describes themselves as the dead simple place to post anything and their claim is mostly true. Unlike other blogging platforms you don’t create an account but instead by simply emailing in your fist post an account is auto created for you. Again, unlike other blogging you post your content by emailing it from your email program of choice instead of creating it from within an admin panel. This is a unique and easy way to post content but unfortunately I also found it confusing after being used to using an admin panel in other blogging CMS’s. Posterous allows for theme customization but there are very few themes currently available and the lack of javascript support from within the themes is also an annoyance.
Pros
- Create an account simply by emailing them
- Auto-posting to a ridiculous amount of other services
- Custom themes
- Ability to have group blogs
- Accepts almost any file you send to it and converts it to the most friendly web format
- Creates iTunes ready podcasts out of MP3 files you send to it
- Free custom domains
- Ability to import from other blogging platforms
- Hosted by Posterous so no additional hosting fees
Cons
- No account creation instead an account is created when you email them. This was a little confusing at first and I think others may be confused by this as well
- Expected to post by email instead of an admin interface. Found this confusing at first as well
- Only 1GB of file storage
- Very limited theme selection
- No javascript support currently for themes
- Must use the Posterous commenting system and can’t change to Disqus, Echo or IntenseDebate
- Ability to auto-subscribe those in your email contact book to a daily digest of your blog
- Post by web is limited in functionality and features compared to other services
This is by no means a complete feature list for each of these blogging platforms but I do hope that there is enough information provided to help new bloggers determine which blogging solution may be right for them. As with all blogging software you run the risk of finding out after the fact that don’t like the software after using it for some time and then you run into the issue of exporting your content out of the CMS and into a new CMS. This is the current position I am in as I decide whether or not a custom Tumblr theme is the way I wish to proceed with my blog or if it would be better to move back to a self hosted Wordpress installation.
Let me know in the comments below which blogging software you currently use. If I didn’t include the blogging CMS you currently use let me know the pros and cons of it in the comments as well.
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3 weeks ago
Could Google Buzz Be More Than Just A New Social Network?
Google launched its new social networking platform Buzz about five days ago and it appears Google has been listening to user feedback and has been able to close up some of the privacy concerns users had been voicing since its launch. Despite the fact Google has been attentive to its early adopters I am still not convinced that Google Buzz is a social networking platform and instead may actually be a real-time blogging platform.
Google has already built many blogging features into its Buzz service currently implemented by many of the other blogging platforms either by design or via a plugin system.
Features found inside Buzz that are similar to other blogging platforms include:
- Buzz pulls in all your content from around the web (Flickr, Picasa, Reader, etc…)
- With the major exclusion of Facebook Buzz is able to pull in most of your social graph
- Buzz allows for long form content to be posted where Facebook and Twitter both have limits on the amount you can post
- Built in commenting system
- Built in sharing system
- Built in upvoting system
- Tight integration with its mobile platform
So, what would Google need to do to become a real-time blogging platform?
- Allow customization/templating of your Buzz/Profile page
- Ability to use your own domain instead of the profile url
- Facebook integration into the connected sites
- Text formatting tools like those already found in Gmail
- Third party tools for posting
I don’t think it’s Facebook and Twitter that have anything to worry about as they have already reached a massive audience that will be hard to win over, but instead if I were Tumblr and Posterous I would be looking over my shoulder at the Google giant that is about to strike.
What do you think? Is Google Buzz a new social network or could it be more of a real-time blogging platform? Who should be most worried about Buzz? Is it Facebook and Twitter or Posterous and Tumblr?
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3 weeks ago
To Succeed Online You Must Be Yourself And Be Honest With Your Audience
With the new web 2.0 social networking driven internet it is no longer easy to hide behind an avatar or fake profile. If you want to succeed in this world you must be honest and you must be yourself.
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Notes: 1 / 4 weeks ago
What's All The Buzz About?
Google has launched a new social networking platform heavily integrated into its webmail service Gmail. The new platform called Buzz is the latest effort by Google to enter into the social market. Google quickly began to roll the new service out to its current Gmail users and expects that all users will have the Buzz service within a couple of days.
As of this writing I do not have the Buzz feature integrated into my Gmail account but from reading the various blogs that covered the Google press conference this is what is known about Buzz:
- Auto-following
- Ability to change the privacy setting on shared content
- Status updates delivered to your Gmail inbox
- Ability to recommend posts to friends-of-friends
- Twitter style @ replies
- Integration with Twitter, Picasa, Flickr and Google Reader
- View image thumbnails within each post
- Real time updates
You can watch the Google Buzz demo video below:
Why Google Buzz Will Fail
Personally I think Buzz will be a failed product that Google will probably forget about in a year and here are my reasons why:
- Auto-following – I can’t confirm at this point but I assume what Google means by auto-follow is that anybody you have previously emailed in the past with a Gmail account you will now be following/friending them. If this is how it is intended to work this was poorly thought out by the Google engineers. There are email contacts in my Gmail account that I have sent messages to once and never again. Why would I choose to follow these people? Google and any other company getting into the social networking business should not assume and/or automatically sign you up to follow other users. This type of auto follow is going to lead to artificial follower counts much in the same way as the Twitter suggested user lists did before they changed the format.
- Facebook Is Missing - I couldn’t help but notice that during their demo video they mention integration with Twitter, Picasa, Flickr and Google Reader but strangely enough no mention of Facebook. How can Google Buzz claim to be truly integrated with other social networking sites when they don’t even integrate with the 400+ million user juggernaut that is Facebook? Oddly enough I see no mention integration with Google’s other failed social networking platform Orkut either.
- The Name – Buzz seems to be a poorly chosen name and one that I and many other people already associate with another site. Yahoo currently runs a social news site called Buzz that you can find at http://buzz.yahoo.com and with Google now choosing to also call its social networking platform Buzz this may lead to a fragmented and confused internet audience.
- Built By Engineers – I have looked at the Buzz profile page for a couple of users such as Mashable who have had access to the service. To be nice…it’s ugly. It’s a plain white page with what appears to be not customization. I realize Google is full of really smart and talented engineers who make a great search product but at some point you would think they could spend some of their billions on hiring some top notch graphic designers and usability experts to ensure they deliver not only a great looking product but one that can be used by your average internet user without help.
- Cross-Posting – Will Google Buzz be able to post to all my other social network profiles or will it simply aggregate that information to be posted solely within Buzz? If Google was smart they would grant users the ability to post a status update to Buzz and then have Buzz cross-post it to all the users other social networking sites.
- Email Only – Why did Google make the decision to allow access to Buzz only through Gmail on the desktop? I believe this will only work in confusing their users as most (including myself) thing of Gmail as an email destination and not as a social networking destination. Google is going to have a hard fought branding battle in ensuring that their users remember that Gmail is now more than simple email.
- Nothing New – Google Buzz adds nothing new to social networking that hasn’t already been implemented better on another site. What incentive is there for a user to leave their current favorite social site and move their social graph over to Buzz?
One Reason Google Buzz May Succeed
- 146 Million Users – Gmail currently has 146 million users and each and every single one of those users will be getting Buzz rolled out to them in the upcoming days. If everyone of those Gmail users decides to adopt Buzz as their social networking platform of choice that mean Buzz would have 1/4 the amount of users as Facebook only days after initial launch.
From my point of view I think that Buzz will fail as it adds nothing new to the social scent that hasn’t already been done and this feels to much like an effort by Google to show that “Hey, we’re here too, look at us” instead of an actual push into social networking.
Please leave a comment below with your opinion on Google Buzz.
- Do you think it will be a success or a failure?
- Have you used it yet?
- What are your initial thoughts?
For additional reading and sources of information I used please check out:
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4 weeks ago
Defining Goals To Help You Achieve Social Media Success
By now many companies and individuals have heard the buzz around social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and are wondering how using social networking sites such as these can help their businesses and brands grow.
Still other companies and individuals have tested the social media waters by setting up a Twitter account or a Facebook fan page; tweeted or posted an update or two and dismissed the whole thing as a waste of their time.
Lastly, we have those companies and individuals who have dived right into the social networking pool and have signed up for an account on every social networking site they can find. They typically move from social networking site to social networking site posting the odd status update on each of the different sites and generally lack a focus as to what they are trying to accomplish.
In order to be successful using the social media sites you can’t be a bystander wondering how they work, nor can you post a single update and never use it again and it’s probably not the best idea to sign up to every single site and hope that something sticks.
If your brand wishes to be successful in using the many social media tools freely available you need to not only research the tools that are available for you to use, but you also need to set goals for what you wish to accomplish when using social networking and social media.
Here are a few of the things I would coach individuals, business and brands on if they looking to discover if the use of social networks were right for them or if I was working with a company who was trying to refocus their energy into making their current social media campaigns successful:
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Research – Start by researching the different social networks that are available for you to use, making sure not to limit yourself to only Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. There are literally hundreds of other sites out there including: Bebo, Friendster, Orkut, LinkedIn and many others.
Your research should include what types of sites there are, what type of content is allowed to be posted and shared (images, video, text), the different ways you interact with the site (web only or is there a third party tool you can use), how active the community is and if your users are currently using that particular social networking site.
Your research may uncover that although the community is large and very active the people you are targeting aren’t currently using that site (so neither should you at the moment) or you may find a small niche community full of the users you are trying to attract to your brand. -
Time – Many people foolishly assume that social media will be a quick fix to whatever their marketing/branding problems may be. What they don’t realize is that in actuality there is a great amount of time, dedication and participation required in order to make social media successful for any brand.
Some of the questions you need to ask concerning your time and availability should include:- How much time do you have to spend posting status updates, uploading videos, taking and sharing pictures and tweeting?
- Will you be the person solely responsible for your social networking efforts?
- Will you hire an additional employee to cover the social media tasks?
- Will a team be in charge of the social media?
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Goals – Just like in life, in order to be successful in social media you need to set goals. Without goals in place your social media efforts will most certainly not be effective and you will not only be wasting your time but the time of the users you are trying to attract to the brand as well. Having set and defined goals in place will also help you to analyze and track the effectiveness of your social media campaigns.
Some of the goals you could set for your social media efforts include:- Attracting X number of fans or followers
- Increasing brand recognition
- Distributing coupons/discounts on products and seeing a certain percentage of them used during purchase
- Attract new employees to the company
- Solicit product ideas
Social media and social networking can be some of the best tools available when trying to establish a brand or when trying to breathe new life into an older established brand. It can provide a way to reach your customers, provide a platform to improve your products or it could be used to help sell your products but don’t expect any or all of this to happen overnight.
In order to be successful with social media you and your brand must be willing to put in the time, dedication and research needed to grow a community and you must set measurable goals to track and define your success.
If you are missing out on any of these parts you and your brand may still achieve success within social media but because you haven’t defined, measured and tracked any goals you may never know it.
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Research – Start by researching the different social networks that are available for you to use, making sure not to limit yourself to only Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. There are literally hundreds of other sites out there including: Bebo, Friendster, Orkut, LinkedIn and many others.
Like hockey? Check out the hockey social news network: IceColdNews.com
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