Overclocked

Michael Arrington says Google doesn’t have a real blog because it won’t allow comments. I come down pretty strongly on the other side of this argument.

At the end of the day, a blogger is judged by his or her own content, not that of commenters. How a blogger carries on the conversation, whether through comments, trackbacks, or e-mail, certainly affects the quality of that content and enhances the personal voice so essential to blogging. But we seem to be wading too deep into semantics by using strict technical criteria to define blogging, be it comments, reverse chronological order, etc.

What matters in blogging is voice. I can post a single page article on a website written in my own voice (not PR-speak), sprinked with hyperlinks, with nothing more than my e-mail address for feedback purposes, and it would be more bloggy that a press release that allows comments and trackbacks.

During the last presidential campaign, they said we didn’t have a real blog because we didn’t allow comments. Say what you will, but the vast majority of the content was original and not repurposed from other sources. What I’m saying is that you have to judge the source before you judge the feedback mechanism. If Google’s content sucks, if it’s just recycled press releases, then you can say it’s not a blog. Companies and organizations that truly listen (and that includes comments as one of many tools) will be all the more successful, but if you don’t have interesting content, you are nowhere.

I’m something of a curmudgeon when it comes to blogging apps. I was using something called Greymatter right about a year after its expiration date. And I’ve just switched from Movable Type to Wordpress.

Bottom line: MT is still a fine piece of software, so it’s still a close call. Wordpress won’t win the runaway victory its evangelists claim, but the positives still outweigh the negatives.

Positives

• No rebuilds.
• It’s PHP markup so it at least feels more mashable with other cool stuff you might want to do.
• The plugin architecture is seamless. Just upload, activate and go. I’ve had to resort to fewer source code modifications than with MT. The Featured Posts box on the politics blog was an elaborate hack in MT but is simple in Wordpress.
• WYSIWYG editor (though my tolerance wears thin… read on)
• An interface that makes sense for maintaining other pages (About, Research, etc.). MT was a document repository where I stored all my PHP files — Wordpress is a veritable database for content. Also, comments are enabled on regular content — you had to get creative with this in MT. More on the flip side below.
• Edit link displayed for users on the front end.
• RSS for comments. Schweet. (BTW, it amazes me no one has built a Technorati for comments.)

Negatives

• The very legitimate downside of no rebuilds is performance. If you’re getting slammed from the Digg homepage, I’m not sure you’d want Wordpress as your engine with all the hits against the database it has to do. More spike-y sites that get regular traffic from Digg and/or Drudge are probably better off with some sort of “baking system” like MT, with some PHP includes used in lieu of built-in modules to minimize inconsistencies. (Does MediaTemple’s Grid make this point obsolete?)
• Three blogs means three separate installs. MT isn’t completely elegant in this respect, but you can at least maintain multiple blogs under one install. I’m trying to mitigate this by relying on PHP includes so the templating is consistent across all three blogs.
• The flip-side of the WYSIWYG editor is fewer formatting options, which makes including pre-formatted code-heavy posts like polls a bit dicey. It looks like I’m going to have to constantly turn the editor on and off in the user settings. (Wanted: A PHP-aware Dreamweaver plugin for Wordpress.)
• The page organization has a flip-side too. In MT, I had one place to store all non-post PHP code. Here, I have to flip between Pages, Presentation, and Files depending on the type of file. BTW, an app with multiple pages in a given directory will have to be built out as a File, not a Page.