When people start out blogging they often ask what blogging platform they should use – WordPress or Blogger? Tumblr or Posterous? It’s impossible to give an answer, because the first questions should be: who is going to use it, how, and what and who for?

To illustrate how the answers to those questions can help in choosing the best platform, I decided to go through the 35 or so blogs I have created, and why I chose the platforms that they use. As more and more publishing platforms have launched, and new features added, some blogs have changed platforms, while new ones have made different choices to older ones.

Bookmark blogs (Klogging) – Blogger and WordPress to Delicious and Tumblr

When I first began blogging it was essentially what’s called ‘klogging’ (knowledge blogging) – a way to keep a record of useful information. I started doing this with three blogs on Blogger, each of which was for a different class I taught: O-Journalism recorded reports in the field for online journalism students, Interactive Promotion and PR was created to inform students on a module of the same name (later exported to WordPress) and students on the Web and New Media module could follow useful material on that blog.

The blogs developed with the teaching, from being a place where I published supporting material, to a group blog where students themselves could publish their work in progress.

As a result, Web and New Media was moved to WordPress where it became a group blog maintained by students (now taught by someone else). The blog I created for the MA in Television and Interactive Content was first written by myself, then quickly handed over to that year’s students to maintain. When I started requiring students to publish their own blogs the original blogs were retired.

One-click klogging

By this time my ‘klogging’ had moved to Delicious. Webpages mentioned in a specific class were given a class-specific tag such as MMJ02 or CityOJ09. And students who wanted to dig further into a particular subject could use subject-specific tags such as ‘onlinevideo‘ or ‘datajournalism‘.

For the MA in Television and Interactive Content, then, I simply invented a new tag – ‘TVI’ – and set up a blog using Tumblr to pull anything I bookmarked on Delicious with that tag. (This was done in five minutes by clicking on ‘Customise‘ on the main Tumblr page, then clicking on Services and scrolling down to ‘Automatically import my…‘ and selecting RSS feed as Links. Then in the Feed URL box paste the RSS feed at the bottom of delicious.com/paulb/tvi).

(You can do something similar with WordPress – which I did here for all my bookmarks – but it requires more technical knowhow).

For klogging quotes for research purposes I also use Tumblr for Paul’s Literature Review. I’ve not used this as regularly or effectively as I could or should, but if I was embarking on a particularly large piece of research it would be particularly useful in keeping track of key passages in what I’m reading. Used in conjunction with a Kindle, it could be particularly powerful.

Back to the TVI bookmarks: another five minutes on Feedburner allowed me to set up a daily email newsletter of those bookmarks that students could subscribe to as well, and a further five minutes on Twitterfeed sent those bookmarks to a dedicated Twitter feed too (I could also have simply used Tumblr’s option to publish to a Twitter feed). ‘Blogging’ had moved beyond the blog.

Resource blogs – Tumblr and Posterous

For my Online Journalism module at City University London I use Tumblr to publish a curated, multimedia blog in addition to the Delicious bookmarks: Online Journalism Classes collects a limited number of videos, infographics, quotes and other resources for students. Tumblr was used because I knew most content would be instructional videos and I wanted a separate place to collect these.

The more general Paul Bradshaw’s Tumblelog (http://paulbradshaw.tumblr.com/) is where I maintain a collection of images, video, quotes and infographics that I look to whenever I need to liven up a presentation.

For resources based on notes or documents, however, Posterous is a better choice.

Python Notes and Notes on Spreadsheet Formulae and CAR, for example, both use Posterous as a simple way for me to blog my own notes on both (Python is a programming language) via a quick email (often drafted while on the move without internet access).

Posterous was chosen because it is very easy to publish and tag content, and I wanted to be able to access my notes based on tag (e.g. VLOOKUP) when I needed to remember how I’d used a particular formula or function.

Similarly, Edgbaston Election Campaign Exprenses and Hall Green Election Campaign Exprenses use Posterous as a quick way to publish and tag PDFs of election expense receipts from both constituencies (how this was done is explained here), allowing others to find expense details based on candidate, constituency, party or other details, and providing a space to post comments on findings or things to follow up.

Niche blogs – WordPress and Posterous

Although Online Journalism Blog began as ‘klogging’ it soon became something more, adding analysis, research, and contributions from other authors, and the number of users increased considerably. Blogger is not the most professional-looking of platforms, however (unless you’re prepared to do a lot of customisation), so I moved it to WordPress.com. And when I needed to install plugins for extra functionality I moved it again to a self-hosted WordPress site.

Finally, when the site was the victim of repeated hacking attempts I moved it to a WordPress MU (multi user) site hosted by Philip John’s Journal Local service, which provided technical support and a specialised suite of plugins.

If you want a powerful and professional-looking blogging platform it’s hard to beat WordPress.com, and if you want real control over how it works – such as installing plugins or customising themes – then a self-hosted WordPress site is, for me, your best option. I’d also recommend Journal Local if you want that combination of functionality and support.

If, however, you want to launch a niche blog quickly and functionality is not an issue then Posterous is an even better option, especially if there will be multiple contributors without technical skills. Council Coverage in Newspapers, for example, used Posterous to allow a group of people to publish the results of an investigation on my crowdsourced investigative journalism platform Help Me Investigate. The Hospital Parking Charges Blog did the same for another investigation, but as it was only me publishing, I used WordPress.

Group blogs – Posterous and Tumblr

Posterous suits groups particularly well because members only need to send their post to a specific email address that you give them (such as post@yourblog.posterous.com) to be published on the blog.

It also handles multimedia and documents particularly well – when I was helping Podnosh‘s Nick Booth train a group of people with Flip cameras we used Posterous as an easy way for members of a group to instantly publish the video interviews they were doing by simply sending it to the relevant email address (Posterous will also cross-publish to YouTube and Twitter, simplifying those processes).

A few months ago Posterous launched a special ‘Groups’ service that publishes content in a slightly different way to make it easier for members to collaborate. I used this for another Help Me Investigate investigation - Recording Council Meetings – where each part of the investigation is a post/thread that users can contribute to.

Again, Posterous provides an easy way to do this – all people need to know is the email address to send their contribution to, or the web address where they can add comments to other posts.

If your contributors are more blog-literate and want to retain more control over their content, another option for group blogs is Tumblr. Brumblr, for example, is one group blog I belong to for Birmingham bloggers, set up by Jon Bounds. ‘We Love Michael Grimes‘ is another, set up by Pete Ashton, that uses Tumblr for people to post images of Birmingham’s nicest blogger.

Blogs for events – Tumblr, Posterous, CoverItLive

When I organised a Citizen Journalism conference in 2007, I used a WordPress blog to build up to it, write about related stories, and then link to reports on the event itself. Likewise, when later that year the NUJ asked me to manage a team of student members as they blogged that year’s ADM, I used WordPress for a group blog.

As the attendees of further events began to produce their own coverage, the platforms I chose evolved. For JEEcamp.com (no longer online), I used a self-hosted WordPress blog with an aggregation plugin that pulled in anything tagged ‘JEEcamp’ on blogs or Twitter. CoverItLive was also used to liveblog – and was then adopted successfully by attendees when they returned to their own news operations around the country (and also, interestingly, by Downing Street after they saw the tool being used for the event).

For the final JEEcamp I used Tumblr as an aggregator, importing the RSS feed from blog search engine Icerocket for any mention of ‘JEEcamp’.

In future I may experiment with the Posterous iPhone app’s new Events feature, which aggregates posts in the same location as you.

Aggregators – Tumblr

Sometimes you just want a blog to keep a record of instances of a particular trend or theme. For example, I got so sick of people asking “Is blogging journalism?” that I set up Is Ice Cream Strawberry?, a Tumblr blog that aggregates any articles that mention the phrases “Is blogging journalism”, “Are bloggers journalists” and “Is Twitter journalism” on Google News.

This was set up in the same way as detailed above, with the Feed URL box completed using the RSS feed from the relevant search on Google News or Google Blog Search (repeat for each feed).

Likewise, Online Journalism Jobs aggregates – you’ve got it – jobs in online journalism or that use online journalism skills. It pulls from the RSS feed for anything I bookmark on Delicious with the tag ‘ojjobs’ – but it can also be done manually with the Tumblr bookmark or email address, which is useful when you want to archive an entire job description that is longer than Delicious’s character limit.

Easy hyperlocal blogging – WordPress, Posterous and Tumblr

For a devoted individual hyperlocal blog WordPress seems the best option due to its power, flexibility and professionalism. For a hyperlocal blog where you’re inviting contributions from community members via email, Posterous may be better.

But if you want to publish a hyperlocal blog and have never had the time to do it justice, Tumblr provides a good way to make a start without committing yourself to regular, wordy updates. Boldmere High Street is my own token gesture – essentially a photoblog that I update from my mobile phone when I see something of interest – and take a photo – as I walk down the high street.

Personal blogs

As personal blogs tend to contain off-the-cuff observations, copies of correspondence or media, Posterous suits it well. Paul Bradshaw O/T (Off Topic) is mine: a place to publish things that don’t fit on any of the other blogs I publish. I use Posterous as it tends to be email-based, sometimes just keeping web-based copies of emails I’ve sent elsewhere.

It’s difficult to prescribe a platform for personal blogs as they are so… personal. If you talk best about your life through snatches of images and quotes, Tumblr will work well. I have a family Tumblr, for example, that pulls images and video from a family Flickr account, tweets from a family Twitter feed, video from a family YouTube account, and also allows me to publish snatches of audio or quotes.

You could use this to, for instance, create an approved-members-only Facebook page for the family so other family members can ‘follow’ their grandchildren, and publish updates from the Tumblr blog via RSS Graffiti. Facebook is, ultimately, the most popular personal blogging platform.

If it is hard to separate your personal life from your professional life, or your personal hobby involves playing with technology, WordPress may be a better choice.

And Blogger may be an easy way to bring together material from Google properties such as Picasa and Orkut.

Company blogs

Likewise, although Help Me Investigate’s blog started as two separate blogs on WordPress (one for company updates, the other for investigation tips), it now uses Posterous for both as it’s an easier way for multiple people to contribute.

This is because ease of publishing is more important than power – but for many companies WordPress is going to be the most professional and flexible option.

For some, Tumblr will best communicate their highly visual and creative nature. And for others, Posterous may provide a good place to easily publish documents and video.

Blogs – flexible enough for anything

What emerges from all the above is that blogs are just a publishing platform. There was a time when you had to customise WordPress, Typepad or Blogger to do what you wanted – from linkblogging and photoblogging to group blogs and aggregation. But those problems have since been solved by an increasing range of bespoke platforms.

Social bookmarking platforms and Twitter made it easier to linkblog; Tumblr made it easier to photoblog or aggregate RSS feeds. Posterous lowered the barrier to make group blogging as easy as sending an email. CoverItLive piggybacked on Twitter to aggregate live event coverage. And Facebook made bloggers of everyone without them realising.

A blog can now syndicate itself across multiple networks: Tumblr and Posterous make it easy to automatically cross-publish links and media to Twitter, YouTube and any other media-specific platform. RSS feeds can be pulled from Flickr, Delicious, YouTube or any of dozens of other services into a Facebook page or a WordPress widget.

What is important is not to be distracted by the technology, but focus on the people who will have to use it, and what they want to use it for.

To give a concrete example: I was once advising an organisation who wanted to publish their work online and help young people get their work out there. The young people used mobile phones (Blackberrys) and were on Facebook, but the organisation also wanted the content created by those young people to be seen by potential funders, in a professional context.

I advised them to:

• Set up a moderated Posterous so that it would cross-publish to individuals’ Facebook pages (so there would be instant feedback for those users rather than it be published in an isolated space online that their friends had to go off and find);
• Give the Posterous blog email address to the young people so they could use it to send in their work (making it easy to use on a device they were comfortable with);
• Then to set up a separate ‘official’ WordPress site that pulled in the Posterous feed into a side-widget alongside the more professional, centrally placed, content (meeting the objectives of the organisation).

This sounds more technically complex than it is in practice, and the key thing is that it makes publishing as easy as possible: for the young users of the service, they only had to send images and comments to an email address. For members of the organisation they only had to write blog posts. Everything else, once set up, was automated. And free.

Many people hesitate before blogging, thinking that their effort has to be right first time. It doesn’t. Going through these blogs I counted around 35 that I’ve either created or been involved in. Many of those were retired when they ceased to be useful; some were transferred to new platforms. Some changed their names, some were deleted. Increasingly, they are intended from the start to have a limited shelf life. But every one has taught me something.

And those are just my experiences – how have you used blogs in different ways? And how has it changed?

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Elections bring out the best in online journalism. News organisations have plenty of time to plan, there’s a global audience up for grabs, and the material lends itself to interactive treatment (voter opinions; candidates’ stances on various issues; statistics and databases; constant updates; personalisation).

Not only that, but the electorate is using the internet for election news more than any other medium apart from television (and here are some reasons why).

PaidContent has a good roundup of various UK editors’ views, and decides blogs, Twitter and data are the themes (more specifically, liveblogging and mapping).

Choice picks include the Telegraph teaming up with the New York Times and RealClearPolitics.com; the Independent teaming up with LiveJournal.; and MSN teaming up with Populus for a “wisdom-of-crowds” predictor. Sky’s interactive map is quite fun too.

Innovation in Newspapers has been running an ‘Election Journalism Caviar’ series, mainly focusing on the journalism itself, but interactive highlights include the New York Times’ Electopedia of candidates’ views and PolitiFact’s ‘Attack File’ scoring the attacks made on candidates.

Chrys Wu has an overview of where to follow the results live online:

“Editors at Yahoo News will be culling election-related photos from [Flickr] and posting them on yahoo.com and news.yahoo.com. Put the word “election” somewhere in the title, comment or tag to be part of the search.

“If you’re going to be out and about, bookmark the Online NewsHour’s mobile site. In addition to updates on the election, there’s a handy list of poll closing times and electoral votes.”

And Reuters has a piece on the use of user generated content:

“The New York Times is asking its Web site visitors to take pictures of their polling places and upload them … Nonprofit group Video the Vote plans to post up to 1,000 video reports, focusing on any problems at the polls … [and] Current TV … through a partnership with social networking sites Digg and Twitter will rely on Internet users to provide its news content. The channel’s TV screen will be a crowded and sometimes disconnected “dashboard” of text and video created or chosen by Internet users.”

Distributed journalism, personalisation, and maps

Current.tv, in fact, is “throwing a social media election party” across a number of platforms – the best example of distributed journalism I’ve so far seen – and also the most fun-sounding.

MSNBC’s results widget is another, more obvious, example.

Yahoo has its own flashy election page, with some interesting indicators, including ‘most blogged about’, and how many people are searching for each candidate. If you’ve read Click, you’ll know how important search patterns are. You can also ‘Create your own scenario’ – personalising the map which you can then email, compare or link to from your blog. (hat tip to Matthew Solle)

CNN also does personalisation with CNN YourRaces: a customisable tracking tool that allows you to follow selected races in real time. The service is also available via CNN’s mobile interface.

And I’ve already written about Google’s creep into content creation with its InQuotes project comparing candidates’ quotes on selected issues.

YouTube is doing Video Your Vote, with a map for navigation and colour coding including ‘Voter intimidation’ and ‘Registration problems’.

And two university students started Map the Candidates, which uses a Google Map to present information about candidates’ visits around the US, and is now hosted at Slate.

Map junkies can get more at 270towin.com (h/t Matthew Solle again) and data junkies can get a stronger fix at Perspctv (thanks EricScherer and Joeri Rodenburg).

Text junkies can get SMS updates from the BBC and the New York Times.

Twitter followers Matthew Bennett, John383 and 10000words also mentioned the Huffington Post, FiveThirtyEight.com, and The New York Times’ ‘Choosing a President’ video.

I’ve said elsewhere that 2004 was the blogged election, 2006 the YouTube election, and this year’s Super Tuesday was the mashup election, so what does that make the 2008 election?

The Twitter Election, if replies on Twitter are anything to go by. Building on its success during Super Tuesday, it has a dedicated Election 2008 site (if only it did the same for similar events outside the US), and has partnered with the likes of Current.tv and techPresident for their coverage, while dozens of organisations are using Twitter for their updates, including the Washington Post and TwitterVoteReport. Also watch out for lost of organisations using liveblogging tool CoverItLive, and a few, including St. Louis Post-Dispatch, using live mobile video streaming tools Qik and Bambuser.

Those are just some of the highlights I can find – I’m sure you have more (particularly from non-English language sources). What’s impressed you in the online coverage? What’s disappointed? 

UPDATE: Gabriela Zago adds: g1 (news portal from Globo) has several interesting infographs explaining the US elections, but they don’t seem to have done one especially for today. O Globo (from the same news organization) has 3 maps (they’re in the bottom of the screen). One of them has quotes from Brazilian people living in the US on what they think about the elections.

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I’ve written two reviews over at JournalismEnterprise.com:

CoverItLive is “a Twitter-meets-chatroom-meets-poll that you can embed on your site.”

and the much-hyped FriendFeed is “Facebook, but uglier and more flexible.”

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What happens when you bring together local journalists, bloggers, web publishers, online journalism experts and new media startups – and get them talking?

That was the question that JEEcamp sought to answer: an ‘unconference’ around journalism enterprise and entrepreneurship that looked to tackle some of the big questions facing news in 2008: how do you make money from news when information is free? Where is the funding for news startups? How do you generate community? What models work for news online?

Half the attendees represented the people behind the mainstream media’s attempts to get to grips with the web – the hyperlocal sites of the Teesside Gazette; the mapping and crowdsourcing of the Manchester Evening News; the blogs of the Birmingham Post.

The other half represented what is clear is an emerging cottage journalism industry: niche news websites; local blogs; citizen journalism and news prediction services.

Rick Waghorn’s keynote speech on his experiences of establishing and expanding MyFootBallWriter set things going perfectly. In particular his negative experiences of Google AdSense found a very receptive audience: despite 400,000 page impressions over the summer, he said, his AdSense revenues were only $180, while in seven years the most popular Harry Potter website has earned only $6,500 from the scheme. Following proceedings online, Graham Holliday added: “Bang on on Adsense – I do around 50,000 per month and make $100 – $150 off of it.”

The verdict from Rick: “Clearly if anybody is going to earn a living, it cannot be through Google Ads.”

Instead Rick explained his own business model – a combination of old-fashioned local ad sales; a self-built ad service, Addiply; affiliate sales; and syndication to those big publishers looking to add more local coverage to their global brands.

This was an ‘unconference’, so after Rick’s speech the emphasis was on discussion and exchanging experiences. The group discussing community spoke of the problem of users’ “sporadic involvement“; of journalists not connecting with people online; technological barriers to instant publishing; the need for journalists to become brands. There was an anecdote about bloggers recruited by the Birmingham Post ‘scooping’ the paper by scheduling embargoed news to go live the minute the embargo was lifted. (Not that the journalist concerned felt this was a bad thing).

The group discussing business models scratched their heads at the possibility of OhMyNews’ tip jar model working elsewhere and why it didn’t make a profit from ads and syndication; whether big publishers should buy up startups; and the problems of aggregation, Martin Stabe arguing that the only aggregators that had any chance of success were those that added something, such as geotagging.

The funding group talked of the importance of five year financial forecasts; how to tackle web-ignorant banks; why there was a need for a British equivalent of the Knight Foundation; and how angel investors want to see a big existing market because the risks of complete failure are lower.

And the online news models group discussed how journalism is not just about reporting, but networking; the importance of interaction on every level rather than simply forums; and the need to get out alerts, while ensuring accuracy.

The event was covered live by a team of journalism degree students using CoverItLive at JournalismEnterprise.com, which enabled people to contribute to the discussion – and create discussions of their own – online.

In addition there was a JEEcamp aggregator which pulled together blog posts, images, video, bookmarks and tweets following the event, and a Twitter aggregator pulling together tweets from attendees. Video of the event should appear on the European Journalism Centre website. Video of Rick’s speech was live streamed by Mark Comerford.

Reflections on the event worth reading elsewhere include Azeem Ahmad’s report on the day; Alex Gamela’s online highlights; Journalism.co.uk’s reports; Charlie Beckett on community; Pete Ashton on news as a game; and Rick Waghorn’s blog posts written after the event.

The day ended with a panel discussion of some of the emerging issues. As I looked out at the people gathered it occurred to me that in ten years time one half would probably have bought out the other half.

The question is, which half will be which?

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If you’ve not been able to attend JEEcamp, you can still take part online. We will be running live coverage at JournalismEnterprise.com – and taking your questions and comments.

We’ll be using CoverItLive, which allows users to post comments, chatroom-style, and we’ll be incorporating these into the event itself.

Here’s how it (should) work: there will be five topics being discussed during the event: funding; business models; online news models; legals; and building audiences and community.

Each topic will have a correspondent attached – a journalism student from Birmingham City University who will be reporting what’s being discusse, but also feeding back any comments or questions from people following JEEcamp online.

That’s all assuming the wifi works, of course…

JEEcamp already has a fantastic mix of people from the news and tech industries – with people coming from as far away as Latvia, Sweden, Spain and South Korea too.

To join in online go to http://journalismenterprise.com/jeecamp-live-coverage/ from 9am till 4pm GMT on Friday March 14 (to convert to your own time zone use this converter)

Ahead of the event you can also add to the event wiki at http://jeecamp.pbwiki.com – in particular any questions under the themes being discussed (http://jeecamp.pbwiki.com/topics)

And finally, there’s an aggregator blog at www.jeecamp.com for anything tagged ‘jeecamp’ on WordPress, Flickr, YouTube, or Delicious (also search results for ‘jeecamp’ on Twitter, Google Blog Search and Technorati).

Look forward to meeting you (virtually)…

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