Teradome.

Many people believe that in order to have a “proper” blog you have to build it yourself. For most people, this is becoming less and less the case. Unless you are a back-end programmer, it doesn’t make much of a difference.

But Noah! Why would you stuff all your work on wordpress.com when you can host it yourself? Well, are you? Are you really hosting it yourself?

Truth is, you are paying a company for web hosting. I use GeekISP for the sites that I build by hand (or by Drupal, now there’s a gray area when it comes to DIY and having it done for you), and I pay them for it. When you add to it, e.g., some MySQL connections, typically the cost goes up too, so yeah you could run your own Basecamp-like package on your ISP, or that additional cost could go into an actual Basecamp account. For most users, the latter is the more headache-free choice.

But what about terms of use violations! Why rely on someone who could turn around and shut your stuff down because they didn’t like it? Sadly, ISPs are under as much scrutiny regarding illegal activity on their networks as these platform providers are. Your web hosting could be blocked just as easily as your dedicated service, and while the laws are slightly more in your favor in the hosting vs. paid application scenario, it’s not by much. Unless you run your own servers in your own house, and your provider is only giving you network connectivity, someone else is serving that content for you and their liability may make them take action on your stuff.

Like any good media archivist will tell you, the key is how easy it is to copy your content. In this case, how portable your data is. Portability is what allows you to pick up from one application service to another just like you could move from one hosting provider to another, if you were forced to. For bloggers, it’s a simple choice: moving posts from one place to another is fairly simple, and only becomes complex if you’re worried about “linkrot.”

There’s been an explosion of good *.tumblr.com and *.wordpress.com blogs out there, many times masked by a custom domain (imagine my surprise when I saw the wordpress.com dashboard appear when viewing a GigaOM site). For many cases, the only hosting you really need can be done by such a platform provider. Both have odd views about portability. Wordpress uses their own XML format, but since it is so popular and well-documented, other sites have added support for the format into their importers — there is no true standard for this kind of export, although the old MovableType format comes close (but only because there was a massive migration from the platform when SixApart started charging money for it).

I love Tumblr, but I don’t like the continued lack of any portability, not even imports. It’s not that I want to change blogging platforms (in fact, I’ve put a lot of content on ice until there’s an import mechanism added because I’ve tried so many others and Tumblr is the product I want), but I want to make sure what I’ve created is backed up — not just in case there’s some rare unrecoverable crash that screws up Tumblr’s backups, but in the long term, like if Tumblr has to shut down and I’m forced to move.

And more importantly, so that my content is mine, in a sense of the word.