Can Disqus And Profy Set Bloggers Free?

Hank Williams | May 22, 2008 9:29 AM

hank photo.jpg I am in Blogger jail right now.

And the capital "b" in Blogger was intentional -- because I'm talking about Google's blogging platform.

I feel like I am in jail because I want total blogging platform portability, and Google locks me in. I want a product that will allow me to suck in everything I have written in Blogger into an independent database. And I want that for my comments as well. Then I want that database to be able to save my blog universe to Typepad, or Wordpress, or whatever. The good news: I may get this sooner than later.

Step one: Freeing my comments. Disqus is an interesting commenting system that allows you to provide much more full featured threaded discussions in place of the default commenting system on standard blogs. Disqus is particularly interesting to me because their commenting system is totally disconnected from any specific blogging platform. So your comments are not in Wordpress jail, or Blogger jail or whatever. You can take your blog to another platform and your comments can come with you.

There are problems with Disqus: If people search for a word that is in your comments, those page views will go to the Disqus web site and not to yours. That's good for Disqus and bad for me, but I've heard that they are going to fix that. I also need them to let me suck all of the old comments that people have made directly on my blog into Disqus. If they can pull that off, I'm in.

Step two: Make it easy to move my articles to any platform I want. There are decent tools for moving from Blogger to Wordpress, and for other individual platform switches, like TypePad to Movable Type. But this is, for me, only half a strategy. I'm much more interested in solutions like Profy, a blogging platform that lets you produce your blog there, but export it to other blogging platforms.

When twittering with Cyndy Aleo-Carreira, Profy's blog spokesperson, I asked her whether they were going to be able to go in the other direction -- and actually suck blogs into Profy. She wouldn't make any promises, but made it seem like a possibility.

If Profy did go ahead with that, I think it would radically change the blogging landscape, and make things much more competitive. And it would really make me feel like I own my blog, not Google.

SAI Contributor Hank Williams is a New York-based entrepreneur. He writes Why Does Everything Suck? Exploring the tech marketplace from 10,000 feet.

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24 Comments

Charlotte (URL) said:

May. 22, 9:51 AM

I feel like I'm in Blogger hell because I can't download images, for 2 days now. There's no one to talk about it to @ blogger.com except all the other bloggers worldwide that are in the same boat. Don't they care??? :(

Svetlana Gladkova (URL) said:

May. 22, 10:18 AM

Charlotte, I think it's just a problem of going for the big services - they just don't feel like they need to care about each and every customer they have because even if one unsatisfied customer leaves, they will have dozens new customers in a few minutes.

And since Profy is mentioned here, for me it is a matter of principle to personally reply to any feedback any user is willing to share - be it good or bad. And I think it's the same for many startups - we are just not big enough not to care about our users. My personal goal for the future is to ensure the same kind of personal attention even when we are big - I don't think companies should behave like spoiled children, no matter how big they are.

allen stern said:

May. 22, 11:44 AM

before i provide a more detailed reply - why can't you just move to wordpress, drupal, mt, etc?

there are plenty of guides to export and import.

Hank Williams (URL) said:

May. 22, 12:07 PM

Allen,

As I said in the piece, there are definitely tools for moving content. But I want to be able to *easily* move from one to another. And I want to be able to do it in full. Thats why the comments piece is so important. The thing I like about profy is I can write in one environment and *target* blogger, and then decide I want to target wordpress. The problem is I cant get my old content into profy yet.

So yes I can move. But it is a project. And if I dont like wordpress I have another project to move it elsewhere. And I want my comments -- not just the new ones, but the old ones.

I guess the best answer is I want portability and I want it easy!

That said, feel free to provide your perspective - as if you wouldn't anyway :)

Marah Marie (URL) said:

May. 22, 12:15 PM

This is an issue close to my heart since I delete my blog with some irregularity, always on a whim, and I always need to put it back up once I get over myself. I do this just often enough to be self-destructive.

When I manage to somehow restore my blog I always lose the comments (funny how the blog linked to in my user info is three years sold yet has never had a single comment on it? Riiiiight!) and I also go through a lot of versioning crap where the version I saved on my hard drive or in some sort of exportable file format is not really the version I wanted to restore (a later edit somehow missed being encapsulated).

None of this constitutes a petty matter. I've argued on the often-destroyed blog itself that every word I ever wrote on it should be autosaved to some sort of portable platform I can take with me anywhere, and the comments should be right there with it, just as easy to grab-and-go.

With a blog you really care about even if you treat it badly at times, it's hard to live with the consequences of deleting it - missing comments, undesired post versions, missing posts, all the inevitable BS that comes with losing and restoring what remnants you can.

Not to mention some platforms seem to make the process of restoring a deleted blog from nothing very arduous. I am thinking of one blogger who never bothers to restore anything after he deletes his because of that. I don't blame him.

The first time I tried to restore my blog after deleting it two years ago, I was forced to use a combination of a few hard drive remnants and search engine caches to put it back together (yes, really). It took days, and final editing, revisions, and so forth took weeks longer.

Same with taking my blog down last year and restoring it several times over after various problems with other platforms I chose - each restoration took on average two weeks to pull off the bare bones of it; rewriting all the internal links so they actually pointed to the blog they were on took a few more months.

It's an arduous, almost heartbreaking process. The guy above me here says, "Hey Hank, what's wrong with all the ways you can already export from one platform to another?" I say, "Everything". The process of saving every bit of the blog, from pictures to posts to comments to all the sidebar details to the CSS itself needs to be streamlined, needs to become portable, needs to go wherever I go so I'm not tied down to one platform or method for restoring all of it. I want the freedom to be able to do it on the fly- wherever, whenever.

If the hardware guys out there could create the portable flash drive which stores gigabytes of data and goes wherever you go then why can't anyone design the blog that does the same thing? Aren't bits and bites potentially easier to manipulate and port than hardware is?

I can't believe we're living without what I'm describing - not in this day and age.

Massimo Moruzzi (URL) said:

May. 22, 12:22 PM

well, but they'll lock you in Disqus jail for the comments, until a similar alternative pops-up...

"no one is free. even the birds are chained to the sky" - bob dylan

Adam (URL) said:

May. 22, 12:49 PM

www.blogbackuponline.com can do a lot of importing/exporting to multiple platforms.

Jack said:

May. 22, 12:51 PM

I fell asleep half way through the article.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Marah Marie (URL) said:

May. 22, 1:09 PM

Jack, I fell asleep about halfway through your comment.....zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.....oh, huh...wait...what were you saying?

Leslie Poston (URL) said:

May. 22, 2:41 PM

As one of the Profy editors on the tech blog side of things, and as a representative of Profy's new platform as well, I can say I am in love with our new platform. It is sleek and easy to use, and I am so glad you like it as well.

I, too, would love to see an import feature so I could bring in some of of my existing personal blogs tot the platform, and I definitely think that the creators of Profy are looking into that.

twitter.com/geechee_girl

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira (URL) said:

May. 22, 3:45 PM

@Allen I think that the point is that there are a lot of bloggers out there who either aren't as tech savvy or don't want to get their hands dirty with the effort that it takes. It's the main reason I went with endo for my desktop publishing app; by changing out the information on each account, I can switch by pushing the posts out to a new blog. Of course, I lose all my comments that way. But endo isn't a solution for anyone not on Mac, and it does have its limits as an offline app. That's why I love Profy; it does what my two-prong endo/ecto does, but online.

@Adam, very true, and I love Techrigy and BlogBackupOnline, which I've used for the past year. It doesn't do it easily, however, and is really only a backup solution, and doesn't provide any other features.

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Jack said:

May. 27, 12:26 PM

Marah,
Do you need some help with your website? Your PageRank is a bit low (3/10).
-Jack

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