Almost the entire Thanet Blogging community is hosted on a single host - blogger.com. It is by far the most popular free blog hosting solution currently available. This leadership is somewhat undeserved gained from the traction the Google has established with the Google tool bar. Blogger.com lacks a significant number of tools and features that others take for granted.

Google (who own blogger.com) have now blocked all commenters (not from blogger.com) from leaving a courtesy link back to their own blog. Comments, cross linking and connecting are what have made blogging work in the first place. This change cuts right to the heart of that and creates a significant chance that blogger.com users will become isolated in the same way that livejournal.com users have.

Blogger.com already has the reputation of holding the largest collection of spam anywhere on the Internet and now it seems it wants to lock users to the platform. This is a common action for large business driven services that desire "more security". Yet this very act of locking in can backfire as it becomes an anti-feature repelling new users and evicting the more alert current users.

Blogger is great for those trying to speak while under an oppressive government but in almost any other case you'll need just ten pounds to spend and you can do so much better for yourself. Even without that modest budget other free options exist and merit some investigation.

As I have mentioned a problem with blogger.com, when hosted with the free domains on blogspot.com, is that you share the domain name with so much spam. This reflects badly on your blog and on the respect it will get from other bloggers. If you want people to take your blog seriously then you consider placing some distance between yourself and the spammers. Mark Cuban, owner of Ice Rocket (the blog search site) was back in 2005 seriously considering removing all blogspot.com blogs from the listings as the spam blogs were drowning out all legitimate bloggers.

The situation might be slightly better today but the feeling still remains that you put a blog on blogspot if you don't actually care about it. While I can see from the range of Thanet blogs that some are of a very high standard the reputation drop they pick up from blogspot and blogger can only hurt them. Now that Google have started messing about with the very thing that binds the blogging world together there is a chance that these blogs will fall from significance.

What I’ve found, though, is that a large percentage (maybe up to a third) of all Blogspot blogs are spam-logs - sites created to increase the Google ranking of some other site (which is itself usually a Google-spamming site). The ultimate purpose of these spamlogs is usually to drive traffic to a commission-paying pharmacy, pr0n, or casino site. — geektronica.com

Is that the kind of company that we in Thanet want to keep? I don't and I would imagine that this is true for most (if not all) Thanet bloggers. Yet even if Google do bother to clean up their service (and they are still showing no sign of doing so) another question still remains - who owns your blog?

If your blog is a business venture (to draw traffic for affiliate sales, sells a product or drives PPC earnings); if your blog is an official company blog the question to ask is: "why is your business so cheap as to not even host the blog properly?" Perhaps, people will say, neither the company nor the blogger understand blogs and blogging or maybe does not care. This hurts your potential more than anything else.

If you already run a website then surely the blog should be on that site too?

It is not just business bloggers that should think twice before using blogger.com, however, take for an example the story of Charlotte Wyatt. While you read it imagine that you have pressed on an issue embarrassing to the council. They managed to stop David Green blogging (much to the outrage of the local community) so what if they start to think about you too.

Charlotte was born extremely early and had to be resuscitate several times in her first few weeks of life. She was subject to a "do not resuscitate" order and was at the centre of a prolonged legal battle to have this order lifted. Her parents maintained a blog on the subject hosted on blogspot.

Blogger.com (the direct owners of blogspot.com) are a US based company subject to the laws of the United States of America but when the UK courts decided that this information was not in the public's best interest they ordered Blogger to take down the blog. Blogger.com acted without hesitation or challenge. There is no reason why a voice of challenge might not suffer equally within Thanet.

According to savecharlotte.com the message they got looked like this:

Hello,

We’d like to inform you that we’ve received a court order regarding your
blog charlottewyatt.blogspot.com. In accordance with the court order,
we’ve been forced to remove your blog.

Thank you for your understanding.

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team

The fact remains that blogger.com were under no requirement to do anything and have appealed to their own government to protect freedom of speech. However, it is expensive to consult the legal department (apparently) and require that the UK authorities justify themselves especially when the customer in question gives you no money ever. It is simpler for a big company to hit "the kill switch" than to wonder if the order carries any authority.

Goodbye blog, farewell readership, no more search engine placement, so long, nice to know you.

You own exactly what you paid for (nothing) and must start again. This can often be more effort than the emotional reward of blogging and so the blog is gone for good. Blogger.com as owners of blogspot have every right to do this to you at any time.

In preparing to write this article I looked at a lot of blogs and what I found was that more blogspot blogs than all other bloggers said they would not use blogger had they known when they started what they know now. It could be argued that the unique selling point "...of blogspot is due to unawareness. blogspot is catching people young and once you get some publicity you are left with no way back" --AjiNIMC.

Once you start with Blogger you are stuck with them unless a way to move elsewhere (with your data and blog readers) can be found. These solutions do exist but they are not well publicised nor evenly documented.

As a “Problogger” I’ve got to say that I’d NEVER set up a serious blog on a free service. Why? it’s a matter of control. If you are serious about blogging you’ll want to be sure that forever more you’ll have 100% control over your blog and will not be dependent on Google for your hosting. Every time I see a commercial or “Pro” blog launched that uses Blogger I cringe. — problogger.net

If you don't run a website and indeed have never run a website, (not even a blog) and are now starting to consider your options then there are some questions you need to ask yourself:

What features will I need to start with and where are these offered?
What features might I need in the next year, two years, five years or longer?
What will I do if I need a feature and it is not there?
What would I do if I wanted to run a shop or other business activity?
What are my options for changing host or platform?
What does my being on a free host say about me and my blog?
What will I do if I want to criticise my host?
What will happen if a government, authority, large corporation or legally funded persona is frightened by my posts?
What if my activities or content one day find they are not in line with a sudden revision of the TOS?
How can I collect statistics that will measure my success (hits, visits, etc.)?
What will I do about downtime? (for a long while now Blogger.com has suffered from regular periods of "down time" where the service becomes temporarily unavailable)
If my host gets blocked from the big portals how will that effect me and is this likely to happen?
Does my school, college or workplace block blogspot.com automatically to protect it's networks?

These questions can easily be answered (or stop being a consideration at all) at any time if you control the domain and the content. When you control the data it is much harder for bad luck, a falling out or a suspect court order to shut you down. If things get complex you can backup everything, re-point your domain and upload again with at most 24 hours of downtime.

It takes only a little extra effort to find a platform to suit you and your requirements. That effort while seeming a bit much now will be something you will be very grateful for later. OpenSourceCMS.com lists 90 potential platforms that will work on almost all low cost hosting packages. Some are better than others but I will address this in another post.

As platforms go NucleusCMS is easy to get going, free to use and has a very strong support community for English, German and Japanese (as well as other languages to a lesser degree). This is the platform I use here and know that they have methods of exporting from blogger.com available. The platform offers unlimited users and unlimited blogs.

The software you may need to upload with (an FTP program) is free too with a free and open source FTP program like FileZilla which will cost you nothing but a few minuets download (longer over a 56K connection). Other than that you just need everything you already have.

The strongest reason for spending a little money on a domain is that I have a name unsullied by other people's actions and I can take data, platform, inbound links and everything else with me to another provider if things go wrong or an oppressive court action threatens to override my basic freedoms. No man in a suit can press a button and take that from me. This was tested earlier this year with another blog of mine where I spoke up and someone with money tried to use solicitors letters to close me down. They failed because they had no case that the courts would be willing to listen to.

I can not say that had I been on blogger.com that I would have been so safe.

This post is based loosely on another I had written previosely.