Twitter and Facebook save blogging!

Blogging is experiencing (yet another) resurgence it seems.  However, this time, it looks like the very sites that were accused of killing blogs, are now responsible for making them more popular than ever.
I wrote recently about how the sale of Friendfeed to Facebook, has caused people to reconsider where to put their online content.  A number of Friendfeed users are concerned because of Facebook’s reputation for privacy and their angst was widely reported across the ‘net. Users of other sites are now wondering how to secure their online content; if their current providers either go broke or get swallowed up by a company they don’t want to be involved with.
On This Week In Tech (TWiT) respected industry commentators, John C Dvorak, Om Malik and Leo Laporte recently said that the obvious solution to this problem, is a self-hosted blog.  I agree. However, whilst blogs make it easy to share content, they lack the power of Twitter or Facebook, when it comes to communicating/messaging people.  That’s because blog comments lack the fluidity required for conversation.
NOTE: I’m currently researching some open source options, which ‘could’ make it possible for you to not only share your content via your own blog, but to message in real-time with your online network. I will be telling you more about this soon.

The comment gathering trend

In an effort to make their blogs a more central part of their online presence, many bloggers have started to use comment gathering plugins.  Services like the excellent Disqus and Echo are proving to be extremely popular, because of their ability to gather content from various social networking sites, and deliver them to the user’s own blog.
Whilst these plugins offer a useful step in the right direction, the obvious problem, is that once these plugins have been uninstalled, the content they had pulled into your blog will disappear. You only keep the comments actually left on your blog.  In other words you become dependant on them and are kind of ‘locked in’ to using them.
If the content could be pulled in an then permanently stored on the blog, it would be an additional step in the right direction.  By the way, if you know a way of doing this, please let me know.

Your feedback please

I would like to know what you think, about sharing and storing your content with 3rd party providers.  Also, what solutions do you have for people, who want to safeguard their network of followers on services like Twitter / Facebook / Friendfeed. Let me know!