Locked in a war of WordPress

This is not the first time I’ve published. It’s not even my first experience with a blog. I’ve written a collaborative blog with friends, I’m a ‘regular correspondent’ on Derek’s ALIA Blog, I’m about to start writing for the Swinburne Library Blog, and I even want to add to the huge number of library professional blogs everyone wants to read but no-one has time for … least of all me.

This is probably testament to my obsession with seeing my own words in print. You might ask, what did every ego maniac do for a sense of fulfillment before it became so easy to publish online? The answer: we wrote to the Green Guide, which is entirely soulless and unromantic in online form, hence the need for some other kind of online forum.

This is my first experience with WordPress. In the past, I’ve always used Blogger, but I thought I’d use Swinburne 23 Things as an opportunity to present a more sophisticated-looking WordPress blog. Many people are sceptical of Blogger because it is now owned by Google, and any monopoly that so successfully manages to push everyone else out of the market must be worthy of scorn … Librarians in particular have a love/hate relationship with Google; yes, it has simplified the search mindset (why look it up in a reputable source when you can just Google it?), but a single search engine, however wealthy and powerful it might be, cannot put librarians out of a job. Instead of fighting Google, we should take advantage of the simplicity it has brought to the Web. And my advice to you is that this extends to Blogger. Use it.

WordPress may look pretty, but it allows next to no customisation. Users can’t edit the stylesheet underneath their blogs unless they pay for a CSS upgrade. Blogger, on the other hand, is extremely customisable. Users can have as little or as much involvement in the design layout of their blogs as they choose. This blog post even suggests that Blogger is just as good for professional blogs as personal ones. And what’s the point of a free blog if you can’t make it your own? Tim Berners-Lee never intended us to pay for the Web, especially for a tool that allows users both to read and edit the Web at the same time (part of his original design specifications for a Web browser).

I’m a bit of a Tim Berners-Lee fan. The only money he ever makes out of the Web is from the sale of his books. That means he makes a lot less from realising his utopian knowledge-sharing dream (the Web), which some conservatives consider the ultimate vehicle for committing crime, than this man makes from his consecutive jail terms.