I've used or tried a number of blogging platforms over the year, from WordPress to SimpleLog to Mephisto to Tumblr, even all the way back to Xanga. Each have their various benefits and drawbacks. So which did I go with for the newest iteration of my blog? Well, none of them. I rolled my own.
There's likely a number of different reasons for this. I'm a bit of a control freak in some aspects, and the idea of having to learn someone else's code to modify it or to deal with a different way than how I would do something is annoying. I have also floated around different languages, which accounts for the switch from PHP-based to Ruby-based platforms. Then there's the whole usability aspect... how I deal with the control panels, how I can stay on top of new comments, how expandable it is to support extensions to the code like an Akismet plugin.
After reflecting on this further, I've decided it's not really about me at all; it's really about how people understand software. What I was looking for was a simple solution to my problem of blogging. Once the solution was simple, I could develop ways to build off of that simplicity on my own terms. It didn't really matter that I was building the code from scratch; I just couldn't find software that fit that description for me.
That idea of simplicity points towards what's hip and trendy nowadays. 37signals builds super-simplified products that tries not to open too many doors. They step back and let their users forge their own doorways off of the foundation that they built. Reddit steps back and offers a clean and simple interface that lets users choose the news. Google won out over Yahoo in large part due to its barebones start page and obvious search box.
The two clear-cut examples of this are del.icio.us and Twitter. del.icio.us is pretty simple on the surface- add links and go. But from that people can basically build software themselves in order to track new links, track the blogs they've commented on, use it as a tumble log and syndicate those links on their blogs, and so on. Twitter is almost even simpler, if possible: write your thoughts in a short box, read similar thoughts from friends. With Twitter's API and the simplicity of the core service, people have built blogosphere monitoring services, sites aimed to track humorous overheard conversations, even traffic congestion monitoring services. These sites gained their popularity strictly because they were able to hit upon a simple solution that stood back from the fray rather than forced their users into it.
Who can attest to enjoying a Twitter or a Pownce? I'm actually being serious here. I want to give it a try, mostly because I have an odd desire to update these types of services on the fly using my iPhone. (The Facebook iPhone app is so incredibly well done, and that's led me to adding more status updates than I used to in the past, for example.)
But every time I start feeling like, "Yeah, sure, I'll give it a shot and sign up", I realize that I don't really like the whole concept. It could be that I just haven't used it in person and I haven't been hooked or anything, but still the question comes up: who the hell cares about miniscule events or random thoughts that occur in your life? Honestly. I've browsed a lot of Twitter and Pownce streams and a lot of it is just that: a line or two about something that just happened where the user says "hey, let's just shoot this out to the cloud and see what sticks".
I'm not saying it doesn't have its uses, of course. I readily admit I'm not the type of guy who's comfortable with blogging these types of details about personal life, and I'm definitely not the type of guy who would care about miniscule details of my friends' lives. It's not really a matter of comfort, either; it's a matter of most people's lives being boring. Even the ones with the most exciting lives still have a lot of dullness to them in day-to-day activities.
I also see a noteworthy aspect of liveblogging here. After DrunkenBatman went on his "Black people don't use Macs" tirade at C4, John Gruber pointed to a Twitter feed from C4 that had quick one-or-two line live responses from attendees in the audience, and it was interesting to see that sort of live interaction take place in the background of the event itself. This is where Twitter shines, really; you can get a lot of opinions in without seeing all the noise. If everyone was blogging on their own, you'd have to skim through the background story that everyone would write about first.
But aside from those two rather limited demographics (teenagers with a MySpace-esque fetish for personal details and as an outlet for liveblogging events as they happen), I still can't quite see why your normal Joe Interwebuser would want to sign up. I just can't shake the feeling that it's a passing fad that a lot of the upper level web guys partake in at the moment. Maybe it's just a whimsical hope that the kind of longer, more detailed communication found in newspapers, editorials, magazines, and most blogs will survive the "dumbing down" of communication. Guess we'll see how things progress.
Do you tweet or pownce?