Blogger, WordPress and LiveJournal

Today my Khanya blog on WordPress caught up with my Blogger one (this one) on Technorati. They are now running neck and neck with "authority" of 100, and a "rank" of 66360.

It's nearly five years since I started blogging on LiveJournal, with a post on Arthur Shearly Cripps and St Herman of Alaska.

I found LiveJournal interesting, with its "friends" system making it possible to share blogs with people of overlapping fields of interest. Actually it was more a journal than a blog, so the name LiveJournal was accurate.

Two years ago I discovered Blogger, almost by accident. It seemed more like a true blog, a web log, and what persuaded me to start using it was the "Blog this" feature, which made it easy to record and comment on memorable blog posts.

But quite soon after I started using it, a new and "improved" version of Blogger was introduced, in which most of the features that attracted me to Blogger in the first place no longer worked, including the "Blog this". And as functionality was reduced, more and more Blogger users migrated to WordPress.

Eventually in February this year I started a WordPress blog, called Khanya, as an experiment. It didn't seem to have many of the features I missed in the "new" Blogger, but it did have a "trackback" system for linking to other blogs, which worked (sometimes).

I found that if I wanted to blog on something in WordPress blogs, I used the WordPress one, and when I wanted to comment on Blogger blogs, I used the Blogger one, at least for the ones where the "Link to this post" feature was enabled. That was for more than straightforward comments, but rather a spin-off post inspired by an idea in another blog.

Now Blogger has improved, and most of the missing functionality is back. The "Blog this" feature has been improved, and now works with any web page, and not just Blogger blogs. The only thing missing, at least that I notice, is the "Search all blogs" link at the top of the Blogger page. But there is a workaround if one goes to Technorati.

But just at the point where Blogger has regained most of its missing features, my WordPress blog has overtaken my Blogger one, not only in Technorati links, but in page reads as well. The WordPress blog, Khanya, has caught up to this one in just eight months, in terms of "authority", and surpassed it in number of visitors. Has Google left it too late?

Khanya							33	113	1,879
Notes from underground							26	91	1,425

Those are visitor figures for today (so far), yesterday, and for the month so far.

It's also interesting to see where visitors come from:

Khanya

	Num	Perc.	Country Name
	216	53.07%	United States
	47	11.55%	United Kingdom
	41	10.07%	South Africa
	19	4.67%	Canada

Notes from underground:

	Num	Perc.	Country Name
	200	45.15%	United States
	90	20.32%	South Africa
	38	8.58%	United Kingdom
	23	5.19%	Canada
	9	2.03%	Korea, Republic Of

Notes from underground (this blog) gets twice as many South African visitors than Khanya.

As for LiveJournal, responses in the form of comments have dwindled to almost nothing. I now use it mainly for personal stuff and family news and pictures.