Why are you using Google Plus for Blogging?

You could make the same argument about Tumblr or Posterous, really. Fact of the matter is, there are huge benefits to meshing community and long-form commenting. Commenting systems like Disqus just aren't all the way there in terms of fluidity. If you don't have a platform of a certain size, your comment threads can look awful bare with the wrong kind of audience. G+ encourages commenting — and really intelligent commenting, too. In fact, it works almost like a hivemind at times, allowing users to build relationships in new ways.

Look at the issue less as one of ownership and more as one of friction. The reason why platforms like G+ are desirable is because they take away a lot of the friction that a thousand non-centralized platforms create. If someone figured out how to efficiently remove the friction from decentralized blogs, I'd eat my hat because that's how impressed I'd be.

I look at G+ as a supplement to blogging rather than a main outlet, however. I actually think it's better for longer thoughts, while I prefer shorter comments on my Tumblr site.

I think not enough emphasis is being given to audience management. If I write a blog entry, it's public for all the world to see, and, more importantly, it's public for all the world to comment on. With Google+, I can limit who can see and comment on my posts.

With traditional blogs, you don't get that sort of fine control. Either you have a post visible to everyone, or it's private and only visible to you. Either you have comments open, or comments closed. Yes, you can moderate comments, but that gets to be troublesome for anything more than a trivial number of commentators.

Google+ takes away all those problems. Your posts are visible to only those whom you're addressing in that post. In essence, Google Plus allows you to multiplex a single blog among multiple audiences by making posts only visible to certain circles.

I use Google+ fairly extensively for mid-sized "blogs" of a few paragraphs at a time (usually anywhere from 2-4). I do maintain an actual blog, but lately I've started to copy paste any blog entry I make into Google+.

There are many advantages to using Google+: - Most notably, the audience is just much bigger, and the engagement is much greater because there is nearly zero friction to posting. I've been blogging for few years and G+ing (is that even a word) only since it came out, but I have ~40 subscribers to my RSS and ~1400 followers on G+. Audience is a big deal. People don't really use RSS. I get much more interaction on G+ than on my blog, and I like it.

- you and your (presumably good) content are much more discoverable, which allows you to grow your network and find more interesting people. It can also act as a nice easily discoverable portfolio. How often will a random person stumble by your blog? vs. How often will someone land on your G+ page? This will only become more and more likely as Google integrates G+ with Every thing.

- maintaining a blog has some weird connotations that I can't quite put a finger on. People sometimes ask me if I have a blog, and I always feel a little awkward inside saying yes. These connotations are somehow absent when I tell people I'm on G+. Maybe it's just the term and the way I hear it used, I really don't know.

I don't understand your concerns about who _really_ stores the data, or the like. Thank god I don't have to go through all that trouble just to be in charge of some text boxes on the internet. And so what if Google can use my posts to learn more about me and give me more targetted ads? I just see that as a win on my side once again-- I don't want to see mortgage ads on my banners or something.

Is there any difference between Wordpress hosting your blog vs. Google+?

If anything, Google+ gives me some additional flexibility like audience control. For example, I could write general long form content on Google+ for mass consumption and also use it as platform for sharing content with a specific set of people (in one or more circles). Why go to (and expect) other people to follow you to each different social site for content (images, status updates, etc.) when I can compose all of them from a single place and have fine-grained control over who sees each piece of content?

Just because I can set up a personal blog site (whether hosted myself or by others) doesn't mean I want to spend the time doing so. If creating content and making it available are my top priorities, Google+ appears to be a good, centralized place to publish.

EDIT: Removed a dangling "Having".

I find myself using more and more for smaller (than usual) blog posts. If I felt like doing something expansive, I'd write it on my blog and add a link to it in G+. Primarily, it's because there is an audience there. The ease of building up networks of circles makes it X times efficient to gain followers of your content.

I tend to disagree with the post.

Yes you can use Disqus for commenting, but it happened more than once to me when I commented and totally forgot about it because I dont have that nice notification coming from the google or facebook bar. Sure you can have email notifications, but thats just not a nice way do handle it.

In a way, blogging a lot of times is not much more than just a comment/post itself and seeing what happens on google plus, discussion is vital. I don't think the system of blog-linking etc is really scalable.

In a way, Google Plus (and to a certain extend Facebook, Posterous, and Tumblr) present a more coherent solution with content hosting, commenting platform, notification system, following etc. in one place. And we know how people love convenience and a good user and consistent experience.

What i want when blogging?

- Free Hosting (free as in really for free, not cents and not having to setup some Jekyll or whatever)

- Posts

- Comments

- Gallery

- "About me"

I get all this plus the benefit of a locatioan-aware posts on my mobile, social network, groups, messaging, single sign on with my mail, calendar, docs, youtube, etc.

Also, in my experience my Google+ stream has a pretty high quality of posts.

Oh, and as i said, the Google Buzz-like location thing is nice, too.

And i get Twitter like public posts/streams. Following particular persons is nice. Befriending some page on Facebook is 90% of the time a subscription to advertisement in your stream. I, for example, follow a lot of photographers on google plus and it's nice, because the photo capabilites are nice, the posts are excellent and it makes my personal stream even better. On the other hand, i "follow" some pages of bands or cities or games i like on facebook and it's basically ads in my facebook stream with the occasional interesting post. Why not follow these photographers on facebook? Because it didn't "just happpen". On Google plus some people share the circles and voila, there we go with interesting persons (persons, not companies!). Now i have also quite a lot of googlers and musicians i'm following and it's mostly been only interesting personal posts.

Why not facebook? It's security/sharing settings are just too cumbersome. Setting up how my plus account looks like for friends, workmates and the whole world was intuitive, easy and fast.

That said: For me, Google Plus is so much better then Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook combined.

I don't use it, and prefer to host my own content. And because of that, my (non-techie) wife, who does read the posts that are conveniently collected and displayed to her in G+, doesn't read my blog.

You can talk about Reader and how she needs to set up another app and copy various URLs into it, but she's busy and lacking patience. G+ is a big red light on her Google search page; it's hard to not read.

Alex brought up a great point, which he may have thought was a throw away line:

"Let’s leave the pithy comments for disposable social networking services like Google+, Facebook and Twitter."

This is exactly how I see and use G+. I use it to scan multiple stories and bylines, looking for interesting content and stories. I'm not looking for long winded blog entries. Those just slow me down.

I feel the people who are using G+ do so the same way they do with Twitter and other social media platforms. They can consume large quantities of content quickly - which does not mix with long, detailed blog entries. The two are simply incompatible in my view.

One downside to Google+ for this kind of thing is that it seems to use a lot of memory on the client. Not a big deal for people reading on desktops, perhaps, but it can be a killer on mobile.

On my first generation iPad, long Google+ posts that have a lot of comments just kill it.

I assume enough people at Google use iPads that they are aware of this, so I haven't bitched about (this is the first place I've mentioned it) on the assumption that they'll figure out some way to make it work well on mobile. But until then, if I get the urge to blog I'll do it elsewhere and just post a link on Google+.

I totally agree with hosting your own content or least aggregating it in a place you own/control after the fact.

Here's the thing: one's personal web space will likely never be a dashboard or natural hub for thier audience. Posting direct to social nets like G+ ensures more visibility and interaction than what the majority of people will get back on their blog. I think it has less to do with technical considerations and more to do with "where the action is at."

I appreciate all of the insightful comments. All of you have very valid points of course. Do what you feel is right for you. I'm thinking long-term goals though. I've been burned by using services like Tumblr and Posterous, but not in that they're bad services, just that it's much harder to migrate your data to a self-hosted solution after the fact.

> I see the appeal in it though, with the real-time commenting it supports and the level of engagement you get with it. That being said, there’s no reason why you can’t augment your own blog with Disqus commenting to get the same kind of features and results.

I don't see nearly as many comments on my site (with Disqus) as I do on my Google+ page. This is to some extent an apples-to-oranges comparison, but given that a lot of stuff that shows up in my Google+ stream is meant to go into my site, it's not that bad, and the disparity is like 4:1 or higher.

A few weeks ago I started thinking of Google+ as a blog for occasional posts due to high engagement levels. However, since Google Reader integrated with Google+, I've found that my G+ feed has a lot more noise as I share a lot of small tidbits through the +1 button of reader.

I'm now considering creating a commentless blog elsewhere to host relevant posts, but cloning content to G+ for comments.

You can use Google+ to write and manage your blog, but also host the content, with a simple tool I made: https://github.com/lylepratt/Plusify

As a part of serving the blog, it backs up all your G+ posts to an SQLite database. You can set how frequently you want to check Google for content updates.

"Obviously the immediate benefit is owning your own content from the top of the page to the bottom." - I guess. I keep a copy of my G+ posts locally (even though Blogger posts from ten years haven't gone away). Posting it on a blog or G+ doesn't affect the copyright. I still own the content.

Awesome discussion on this folks. I wanted to address some of the questions and comments, but I felt a more detailed reply on my weblog would be more appropriate: http://zerodistraction.com/blog/2011/12/3/part-2-why-are-you...