Between the Facebooks and Twitters of the world that let people connect to each other on the Internet, I bet you’re wondering what the point is of having a blog. I know I thought they all died in 2004. (Except for us at the State Press!)
As a student a blog can serve as a landing zone for all of the pertinent information about you — like a virtual business card. If you can create a blog that focuses on topics related to your major, you’re already 12 steps ahead of your peers and you can finally have a website to put on that resume.
If you have something to say, whether it’s personal or professional, you will have more control over the formatting and ways to promote it on a blogging platform. You might even be able to make a little bit of money off of it too.
Wordpress.com is the free hosting service provided by Automattic Inc., the company that maintains the open-source Wordpress content management system. Just to be clear, “Wordpress” is the name of the blogging software while Wordpress.com is the free hosting service that uses the Wordpress software. Got it?
Through Wordpress.com, all you need to do is sign up for an account and you have a free blog with a fair amount of hosting space and bandwidth that you can begin writing into. If you know HTML and/or CSS you can begin customizing the look of your blog, and if you are just getting started then there are free choices when it comes to picking a theme for your blog. Wordpress doesn’t pull the punches when it comes to choosing how exactly you want to display your post and the different gadgets you can use on your blog.
If your blog starts to get a lot of traffic then you can upgrade your bandwidth through Wordpress.com or export it onto a private server. Hosts like GoDaddy use the Wordpress software as the default, so it won’t be a rough transition when you decide to move up. To top it off, there are a huge amount of extensions you can install into Wordpress if you decide to put it on your own hosting service.
Unfortunately, you can’t place ads on a Wordpress.com hosted blog. If you move to a private hosting service then there a multitude of options when it comes to monetizing your blog.
Wordpress.com has applications for Android, Blackberry, and iOS that also work with privately hosted blogs, as well as posting via email and texting.
Tl;dr – Wordpress is a good long-term choice if you are willing to put in the time to learn it.
Blogger is the free blog hosting and publishing service that is owned by Google. Blogger doesn’t even need a signup; if you have a Gmail account then you have a Blogger account.
Like Wordpress, Blogger allows for custom themes to be uploaded or created with CSS and HTML. Blogger also supports widgets that can be installed directly to your blog. These widgets include thing like Google Analytics, an extension that will measure all of the traffic onto your site.
The biggest strength of Blogger is that it easily converges with other Google applications: Picasa for picture hosting, Google Docs to Blogger for posting, and easy monetization with Google’s ad service Adsense.
Thanks to the work of the Data Liberation Team inside of Google you can export all of the posts from Blogger and convert it to any other blogging platform, losing only minimal data.
Posting text and pictures to Blogger is also possible through SMS and MMS.
Blogger is a serviceable platform if you are just getting started in blogging. My problem with the service is that it just feels old and slow compared to Wordpress and Tumblr. Blogger looks to be rolling out some much need updates in the coming weeks, including a built in statistics tracking system. If you want to watch for updates, go to the Blogger Buzz page.
Tl;dr – Blogger is stupid simple to set up and it’s future looks to be getting better. Currently it is slow and feature limited.
Tumblr can best described as “Twitter meets traditional blogging” — a microblog that let’s you host actual content on it’s pages. Like Twitter, you follow people and have a following yourself, as well as a social stream of updates and content from the people you follow.
Tumblr’s built in services let you post text, photos, chat logs, audio clips, video clips, and “reblog” entire posts from other users. The difference from other microblogging services comes in the fact that almost all of the content can be hosted on the Tumblr servers, thus negating using services like Twitpic or yfrog.
One of Tumblr’s greatest strength’s is it’s clean interface for posting and viewing. Like the other services Tumblr has plenty of free themes and allows you to create new ones with minimal effort.
One neat feature of Tumblr is that it will let you import tweets and an RSS feed into your Tumblr feed. I believe the intention was to allow Tumblr to act as an aggregator for your content, allowing you to interact with the Tumblr community while not focusing solely on your Tumblr page.
Although not an official tool, the Tumblr2Wordpress web app will scrape your Tumblr page for content and export it in a Wordpress friendly format.
One of Tumblr’s greatest weaknesses is that there is no easy way to monetize your page. Although HTML and CSS are supported, the average user will have a tough time formatting the ads correctly.
Tumblr has mobile applications for Android, Blackberry and iOS, and also supports posting through SMS and email.
Tl;dr – Tumblr is more of a social network than any of the other platforms. Easy to generate traffic, but hard to monetize.
No matter what platform you choose to use, blogging is a great tool to add to your arsenal. Add to mankind’s collective knowledge pool and get writing!
Geekin’ It is a blog that focuses on technology and geek culture for ASU students. Geekin’ It covers how to use technology to your advantage as an ASU student, as well as comic books, videogames, electrical engineering and geek culture in general. The writer loves Mass Effect 2, Scott Pilgrim, 8-bit music, creative writing and learning how to use an Arduino board. You can follow him on Twitter here.
