On the occasion of Yahoo! 360 being closed in April 2009, I have some personal recommendations for alternative blogging solutions.

Where to migrate automatically copy legacy Yahoo! 360 contents to

Yahoo! 360plus Vietnam

This product is the official product for Vietnam market with Vietnamese interface.

Click here to see instructions of the utility.

Pros

• Compatibility between Yahoo!’s products
• Local events

Cons

• Community outspread: 360plus Vietnam is for Vietnamese users only

Publish to FeedBurner

FeedBurner is a Google’s property to manage contents via RSS.

This method requires certain technical experience.

Publishing using FeedBurner does not migrate your data to another SNS, but to HTML format where you can backup your contents manually.

How to do that

1. Set your 360 blog to public mode
2. Register an account at FeedBurner or login using your Google account
3. Burn your feed
   
4. Go to Publicize, select BuzzBoost
5. Fill in the form activate the BuzzBoost function
   

Considerations

1. You go where your friends are. Is Facebook where most of your friends reside now?
2. You may want to choose the platform that will be easy to backup your contents. WordPress is best to fulfill this desire

Recommendations

Before you go on with further introduction on the blogging alternatives, here are a few immediate recommendations:

1. Professional blogging: Blogger, WordPress
2. Personal blogging: Facebook
3. Blog to update family and friends: Facebook
4. Don’t really care about receiving comments (but still can receive response): Tumblr
5. Mostly copy & paste: Tumblr

Best choices today

Facebook

Facebook is world’s #1 Social Networking Site. It has a powerful Notes function with very good privacy settings

Click here to see its Notes.

Pros

• Contained within world’s #1 SNS, which means all your social graph and contents are in the same place
• Your friends are updated of your blog post
• Person tagging, which notifies the tagged persons
• Privacy option to item level

Cons

• The ’sense of blogging’ is drowned within a complex SNS
• Ads

Blogger

Blogger is a well-known blogging platform from Google.

What people usually hesitate about Blogger is that it seems to be stand-alone, i.e. no feeds.

However, few know that it has a very useful Follow function where you can get updates from other bloggers using Blogger.

Update from Official Google Blog

KhanhLNQ, Tính năng Following mới nhất của Blogger

Pros

• Professional platform with many built-in widgets
• Good SEO optimization
• You can choose your own domain
• No ads

Cons

• N/A

Windows Live Spaces

Windows Live Spaces is in Live network with more than 40 millions users.

Pros

• Professional platform with many built-in widgets
• Very trendy themes
• Potential to integrate into the new Microsoft’s Live product package
• Privacy option to item level

Cons

• No permalinks
• Ads

WordPress

WordPress is a highly regarded blogging platform. WordPress is offered in two ways: a blog on WordPress.com or software package to run a self-hosted blog.

This blog is WordPress itself.

While WordPress has limited social networking features, one can use plugins or external service to achieve this goal.

For example, MyBlogLog connects readers with the author(s).

Pros

• Professional platform
• Free plugins developed by many supporters
• Free theme designed by many supporters
• Good SEO optimization
• Full control over the contents on self-hosted blog
• One’s own domain
• Privacy option to item level
• No ads

Cons

• Limited built-in social networking features

Tumblr

Tumblr is not a blogging platform, but instead a tumblelog, which is much more of a free-form log.

There are interesting features of Tumblr:

1. You can Follow other tumblrs. All posts of yours and people you follow are displayed in the Dashboard
2. You can reblog other tumblrs, which means copy exactly the content into yours
3. Privacy option to item level
4. No ads

It is much different from a regular blog in ways that:

• There is no comment function
• There is no category or tag

Then why would people want to use it?

• Just log it, no need for meticulous and time-consuming editing

Tumblelog creates a much different experience so it is incomparable to a full-pledged blogging platform. Try it and see it.

Other global sites

The services that I mention here are perfectly social network sites with blogging, photos sharing and communication channels. Explore them as you please

1. Multiply
2. Xanga
3. MySpace
4. Friendster
5. opera

Sites targeting Vietnamese market

YuMe

YuMe’s features and design remind me of Vietnam 360plus Vietnam. However, I find the themes more attractive.

The team behind YuMe is also high active and helpful.

A data migration tool from Yahoo! 360 is provided.

faceViet

faceViet is a Facebook clone built by a team based in San Francisco.

faceViet also provides the data migration tool from Yahoo! 360.

TheGioiBan

Among Facebook clones for Vietnamese, TheGioiBan is the most advanced in terms of design and features.

Until this entry is written, certain features of TheGioiBan is under construction, however.

Trivia

Technically speaking, Blogger and WordPress are purely blogging platforms with certain connecting features. Others are social network sites that provide blogging feature.

You might be interested to read my ponders over Content-centric Social Networking one year ago. One year has past and I’ve witnessed Follow feature standardized by Twitter it has spread to Blogger.

Tai Tran’s presence

While the majority of my blog content is right here on this blog, I am present on all the sites that I have mentioned.

Kindly comment if you want to connect to me via any site listed above.

What is your choice?

Have you known all Google Free services apart from Search and Email?

Have you utilized all Google search options?

Test your Google knowledge by viewing this presentation:


Tai Tran's Lab: Technology As Innovator

Dear Subscriber, if you can't see this presentation in your feed reader, kindly go to the original article to view the content.

Standard HTML

• Always use standard HTML. This helps when transferring content from one platform to another. XML exists to separate format from content, exploit it.
• Keep away from rich-text editors. They produce crap codes.
• When copying text from Microsoft Word, pay attention to the smart quotes. By default, Word automatically replaces “straight quotes” with a pair of “smart quotes”. The issue with smart quotes is that they are not displayed consistently through different web formats. To disable this feature in Word 2007: Menu \ Word Options \ Proofing \ AutoCorrect Options \ AutoFormat As You Type \ unselect the “”Straight quotes” with “smart quotes”" indicator.

Permalink

• If the permalink contains date, do not edit timestamp of posts or the URLs will break. If you have to change the date, keep the old article, write a new one and redirect from the old post to the newly written. Otherwise, if you can live without the date in your permalink, don’t use it.
• “Ending a page with .html helps improving Google PR” is possibly a myth or with their old algorithm.

Categories and Tags

• Try to put posts in only one category. Don’t make visitors feel that they always see the same posts in every category.
• Tagging can be a temptation, but the question is whether it’s worth the efforts to manage. It works perfectly when more than one person is tagging content. If it’s just single-blogger, it turns into a big cloud of decorative rather than helping visitors finding information.

Reading

• Make sure content is loaded before the sidebar. Visitors can read first before the whole page has been loaded.
• Breaking an entry into multiple pages may give you more traffic, at the price of visitors’ tiredness and frustration.

Microsoft Word 2007 supports publishing documents to the following blog services: spaces.live.com, blogger.com, SharePoint, communityserver.org, typepad.com, wordpress.com or hosted wordpress blog

User can also choose other types of weblog, as long as the address given is in the correct format.

It’s a nice feature. However, I personally wouldn’t prefer this utility, because I want more control over my content and I’m quite comfortable with typing HTML directly to web-based editors.

But it’s worth a try, as I’m doing now!

Cheers