Blogging vs. Google+

I’ve been participating on Google+ a fair amount for the past couple of weeks. Unlike Facebook or LinkedIn, there isn’t yet an app to echo my blog postings there, so every now and then I’ll post something to my Ham Radio circle that I’ve also posted to my ham radio blog, KB6NU.Com.

Recently, I posted an item noting that there are now more than 700,000 licensed radio amateurs in the U.S. Quite quickly, there were more than a dozen replies on Google+, while there is currently only one comment on my blog post.

This prompted one fellow—a guy who I might consider a “competitor”—to post this to Google+:

Now here’s something to chew on for the day…

Traditional blogging as a medium for social interaction has changed a lot over the last year or so. If you want to share something and have active engagement about it, a traditional blog isn’t the place to do it.

+Dan Romanchik recently posted an article on his blog about Ham Radio Licensees topping 700,000 in the US. He copied the same thing to Google+. At last glance, he had received no comments from that article on his blog while it instantly sparked a conversation on G+ with more than a dozen comments on it so far.

That’s not to say that no one is reading his blog, he turns a lot of traffic there. It’s just that for whatever reason, many will read a blog post and never leave a comment – never engage.

That’s in stark contrast with the likes of G+ and Facebook where people actively engage with the content. Even though services like this one are subject to come and go, I think it’s safe to say that there’s been a major shift in the way people consume and interact with information and whatever the outcome, the traditional blog format is the clear loser.

That format will continue of course as the software available for managing content makes it drop dead simple to have a nice looking Web site. But if you think you’re going to post ideas and opinions on your blog that will challenge your readers to think – and to engage with what you’ve written, then you’re probably barking up the wrong tree…

I also found it very interesting that my Google+ posting got so many more comments, but I disagree with his conclusion.

As he mentioned, the folks on Google+ are perhaps more active and engaged than my blog readers, but they are two different types of readers.  Just because they are less responsive, doesn’t mean that I’m not challenging them or that I’m being less influential.

A lot of people that read my blog will never get on Google+ for whatever reason. So, if I confined myself to to just one or the other medium, I’d certainly be limiting my reach. There are hundreds in my Google+ ham radio circle, but I’d venture to guess that over the course of a year, I get many more unique visitors to my blog.

Finally, I don’t think that the content on Google+ is as long-lasting as the content in a blog. I get lots of hits for blog posts that I wrote years ago. I’m not sure the same will be true for posts that I make on Google+.

Both blog and Google+ have their unique characteristics, and both will continue to evolve, but it’s certainly  premature to say that blogging is “barking up the wrong tree.” Google+ is new and fun right now. It will be interesting to see if it can keep that edginess over the long haul.