Don't Quit Your Day Blogs

Growing up in an urban area you quickly learn who your friends are by noticing "who has your back." Having someone's back can range from being there for moral support to putting yourself in harms way to protect your friends. One of the instances where I have trouble having someone's back is when a friend is obviously in the wrong or I don't support their position. And right now I don't like the OpenID comment feature on Blogger but I can't help defend it against other garden bloggers who don't seem to have a firm grasp on technology in general.



Today I was looking at the feed stats for my garden blogs in FeedBurner and was looking at the uncommon uses for the feed to this blog. I noticed a new feed reader pulling my feed so I went to the website to investigate how my feed was being used. I didn't come across my entries on this site but I noticed a couple of other garden blogs who were just now catching up with Blogger's implementation of OpenID.

Doug Green blogged about having trouble commenting on garden blogs hosted by Blogger because of OpenID. Reading his post and his comments I get the impression that he's a better gardener/garden writer than he is blogger.

I could sign up for some kind of “anonymous” account but what’s the point?

There is no such thing as an anonymous account on Blogger. An anonymous comment is just that- anonymous. It means that anyone who comes across a blog entry and wants to comment can do so anonymously. Unlike at his garden blog, where you have to provide your e-mail address, if a gardener chooses to allow for anonymous comments people don't have to provide any personal information to comment.

With one swoop of policy, Blogger has surgically removed all future networking/links from outside its own boundaries. Because I host my own blog, I can’t make comments on Blogger sites that will include a link to my site to include myself as part of the ongoing conversation. I can’t include myself and my blog into the conversations of Blogger sites.

On the contrary, the OpenID moves gives greater freedom to move from garden blog to garden blog and comment. If he were to take a moment and educate himself he'd see how with a couple of steps he can make his website his OpenID and provide a link to himself. If you look at the link above to the post here about OpenID from Dec 2nd and scroll down to the comments you'll see that I signed in and commented with my WordPress account. In the comments section of Younger Gardeners-Older Gardeners Bill from prairiepoint.net didn't seem to have a problem making himself and his blog part of the conversation here.

Blogger-hosted blogs are now insulated from the rest of the blogosphere. A blog-ghetto if you will.

I like how his ignorance of technology and web trends becomes our failing and makes us gardeners on Blogger part of a ghetto. I live and garden in an urban area and if Blogger is what a ghetto looks like then Blogger/Google should get into the urban planning business.

I think the real losers in this though are those that blog within Blogger. Not to put too fine a point on it but if you look at the most-read gardening blogs, the most popular, the majority of them are outside of Blogger and self-hosted. Those who blog within the Blogger network will find themselves slowly weaned off contact from these content leaders.

And now the gardeners on Blogger are "losers" because we won't have him and the rest of the "popular" garden bloggers visit Blogger blogs. That's pretty rich, though I am curious as to the criteria he's using to decide who is a popular and who isn't. I see plenty of gardeners on Blogger who get more comments than he does on a regular basis.

Those who blog seriously will move to self-hosting and those who want to play will stay within Blogger.

He should have just opened his blog entry with this sentence and saved me the trouble of reading the elitist ramblings of a Luddite. I like how gardeners on Blogger aren't "serious" because they aren't self-hosted and those of us on Blogger are just playing. I actually have more respect for gardeners that aren't self-hosted because they aren't buying the cow when they can get the milk for free. I suppose real gardeners don't have "indoor gardens" and gardeners serious about gardening have to grow all their plants from seeds too.

Maybe Doug Green will allow me to be considered a "serious" garden blogger if I show the DSLR that my Adsense earnings have afforded me. Or maybe I can be part of the "serious" garden bloggers club if I show him links to my blog being syndicated on major media publications even though it is hosted on Blogger and has tons of typos and dangling participles. Heck, the next time I get scraped maybe Doug Green can ask the scrapers not to take my words and garden photos because I'm "just playing." If you're interested you can read the post and comments on Doug's garden blog.

Not surprisingly Susan Harris of Garden Rant decided to stir the pot after reading Doug's post.

Naturally I assumed that something was amiss - until Doug Green explained that it's intentional.

Her post on the subject is shorter but just as painfully clouded- you can read her post on Garden Rant. Now, Doug and Susan Harris I'm sure are great writers and gardeners but what they aren't is TechCrunch or ProBlogger. When these "content leaders" go around posting about something they obviously don't understand nobody benefits. The only thing I can say is "Don't quit your day blogs," stick to writing about gardening and leave the technical stuff to the thousands of blogs on the subject. And when you don't know, as they say in my neighborhood, "you better axe somebody."
Edit:

Doug Green has closed the comments on the entry in question preferring to wall himself off in what he would surely describe as a garden blog ghetto. Oh Well.