Blogging styles: Articles or Links? 1

I haven’t blogged on this site for a while. I have made some posts to my RUJason site using Blogger. Since blogger’s redesign and the launch of MT 3.0 I’ve been comparing the 2 services and have come to the conclusion that both are now mature, capable platforms specialized for different styles, comments & links, or articles and discussion.

Originally, I settled upon “(extlink)http://www.movabletype.org”:Movabletype for this blog. It seemed like a natural choice, especially compared to other solutions about a year ago. The templating language was more powerful, the plugins provided some amazing functionality, and trackbacks enabled discussions to bounce from blog to blog. In addition a strong design community surrounded and continues to surround Movabletype.

For the most part I’ve been happy with the choice. MT has strong options for managing content, and sorting and categorizing archives to provide a good selection of views into your blog entries. What it hasn’t felt as good for me is in producing something similar in style to the blogs popularized by users of Blogger and Radio – quick snippets of information found while browsing the web.

While you can keep a link-blog in MT, I think the existence of so many services like del.icio.us, Spurl!, etc. (and their popularity within the MT community) attests to the fact that many people are dissatisfied with the ease of quickly jotting a reaction or quoting another web source.

This is something the new blogger in particular excels at. Under Google’s stewardship, they have fixed many of my original complaints, regarding comments, template designs (with some stunning default layouts), and various other issues. In addition, their default bookmarklet with it’s dedicated link field makes producing a BoingBoing style link oriented blog much simpler and, even more important faster.

So, while I still appreciate the power and abilities that MT provides me, I’ve found myself increasingly gravitating towards the ease that Blogger provides. The beefed up profile and other niceties have just been icing on the cake.

I guess what I’d really like is a slight refactoring of MT, perhaps to accomodate a Typepad typelist style linkblog, with a speeded entry process. Until then… while my long articles clearly appreciate MT, I’m not sure that my links will continue to.