Different Flavors Of Bloggish Purpose

I'm looking at some ways of doing a blog, and how these serve different requirements. They fall into three or four families.

Blogger and the like are lightweight solutions. I'll explore their limits either right here or in another post later.

I've been using Blogger for a site relating to a book I wrote and self-published for a few years. I just wanted a lightweight solution for explaining what I was doing and communicating with a group of potential readers.

I didn't contemplate it becoming a piece of IP worth selling. It was just an adjunct of the book. If you are making your blog a sort of publication that you might conceivably pass along to someone else, then free hosting has some ownership issues. You don't own the domain, for example. Here is a list of reasons to host your own blog.

So, many bloggers want a more robust, flexible solution. One popular implementation is to use Wordpress and host it on their own website. If you already have a web presence then the additional bandwidth may cost you essentially nothing, and there would be other advantages, such as styling the blog to look just like the rest of your web presence, and more control over your stuff. Wordpress.org is where you go to look at the hosting software.

Another solution if you are less technical but want more flexibility and control is something like Typepad, which might be good if you really don't want to manage any other web presence.

If you just want a tidy private diary or journal about something, you can also run Wordpress in local mode on your desktop. If you "think in web pages" having links into your junk on your disk might make this a really entertaining and useful solution for helping organize and find your own junk. Here is a lifehacker article about this interesting notion.

This blog is hosted on Blogger basically because I already had the account, and I wanted to start myself along this learning curve. My hopes for it are evolving; mostly I hope it helps me learn about the medium.

If I have any axe to grind, its the feeling that there should be a lot of blogs that are basically tidy collections of annotated link pages. Maybe I'll put my money, or at least my time, where my mouth is.

Shading off into another direction from quasi-diaristic or expressive blogging, is providing some robust content. Now I'm realizing that what I have in mind as "blogging"-- at least for some projects-- is more like a content managment system such as Drupal or Joomla!

Also, these need to be compared to a more explicitly courseware related tool such as Moodle.

All of these look like they're worth further investigation...