BrianJarrett.com

I wrote an article some time back about getting online for little to no money. By getting online I meant an online presence, a website of some kind to provide the rest of the world with information about your life, your interests, your rants, or whatever else you’d like to share. In this article I mentioned Wordpress.com blogs. I also promised a follow up article on MySpace and its role in the grand landscape of personal online publishing.

The blog concept started out basically as a “weblog”; a simple online journal. That, in and of itself, is not too impressive. Not much more impressive than a pad and pencil; the way we’d been journaling for years. The primary advantage is that that pad of paper is now available literally for the entire world to read. In the past, exposure like that went for big bucks; now anyone with a computer and the ability to read and write can attain that same potential exposure. Sure, with the deluge of blogs and self-published content out there it’s still difficult to stand out from the crowd but with search engines like Google blogs can find their niche audience relatively easily.

Blogs have grown from simple weblogs to a full-featured CMS (Content Management System), complete with static pages, embedded audio and video, integrated search capabilities, categorization, image display, and more. Anymore now the blog has become the attractive replacement for the crudely designed personal website; it doesn’t necessarily hold anything more valuable but at a minimum it looks better. This is essentially because the presentation is managed with a central framework and themes are designed by professionals. Normally there are no spinning skulls or animated “under construction” images to be found in the common blog theme. Having said that though, I think the blog framework can actually improve content to a certain extent by forcing people into a viable format which they might have otherwise not used.

Enter MySpace. The crux of this article is about MySpace, and how it plays in the same sandbox with blogs like Wordpress. In my opinion MySpace is more of a social networking tool than a personal publishing tool. Sure, it lets you post information about yourself, like a blog, and it even allows you to keep a blog on your site. It allows you to put some pictures on your site in albums and it allows you to add your favorite music as well. Essentially MySpace gives you one large page with a tightly controlled format for you to enter information that will ultimately build your personal profile.

The most important thing that MySpace provides is their network. Their friend network is, in my opinion, the only thing that MySpace really brings to the table for the person who already has a blog. The MySpace friend network, which allows you to add friends to your profile and conversely allows your friends to add you to their profile, is actually pretty useful. The network allows for social interaction, in a sense a giant meeting ground. It’s been particularly useful to me in getting in touch with friends I haven’t spoken to in years. Just within the past several months I’ve reconnected with scores of high school alumni and old friends I made just after high school. I’d have never spoken with these people if I hadn’t easily found them on the MySpace network. And I can keep up with them via the network, another nice feature. Other uses for the network are dating and other social networking, plugging one’s music, art, or products, and probably other uses I’m not even aware of.

The downside to MySpace is that it looks like crap. The basic page is okay but simple, what I would expect for a default theme. MySpace offers nothing in the form of templates or themes so virtually everyone uses a third party editor to create html codes that they copy and paste into their profile. Normally these look terrible and break just about every rule of good web design, a pitfall that bloggers (with their professionally designed themes) tend to avoid. And when your website looks like crap it taints the content on your site. If your site looks like an amateur designed it then subconsciously your readers are probably thinking your content is amateur as well.

Of course I pick on MySpace because it’s the biggest; Facebook and Yahoo 360 look much better and provide similar functionality to MySpace. The difference is that their network just isn’t as large at MySpace.

I think actually that blogs and MySpace actually serve two different purposes and, for the most part, attract two different types of people. Blogs tend to be used more by “writerly” types; people who are interesting primarily in providing content versus just their favorite band, who they’d like to meet, or what their favorite television shows are. MySpace, I’ve found, tends to be attractive to people who want a rigid structure to provide their profile information and an extensive network on which to meet new people or catch up with old acquaintances.

Having said that, I do believe that MySpace provides some benefit to those with blogs, simply because of their network. Personally my MySpace page is exists solely to utilize the friend network. My page has virtually no information, save for my identifiable information, and a link to my personal site (blog). In other words, I want people to be able to find and identify me and then go straight to my blog for the meat of what I have to offer.

So the blog might not really be useful to the MySpace purist, but, for the blogger, MySpace’s network can actually provide some benefit if used primarily as a tool to drive visitors to your blog. However, it seems that Wordpress.com is actually working toward the “community” approach by adding more and more functionality geared toward social interaction between members of their blog network. Will this erase MySpace altogether? Probably not, but if it means that we have a few more attractive blogs rather than hot pink and green MySpace pages then it’s a step in the right direction.