I just wanted to clear up a few things related to a post I did called “Why I Won’t Hire a Google Blogger Blogger”.

First off, this isn’t the opinion of Splashpress Media or any other blog network. This is just something I noticed when I was going through some employment advertisements.

It shouldn’t matter which publishing platform a person uses, but just like everything else that people assign emotions to, I have a negative feeling about Google’s Blogger. I had bad experiences on the platform both as a user and as a reader. I find many of the people on the site, after working on a service that required me to manually approve blogs, have very basic blogs or very spammy blogs. After going through thousands of Blogspot blogs, I found very few that were well written.

The post was not to make anyone angry but to express something I noticed I was doing. The thing that is supposed to be so great about blogs is their openness, allowing personal opinions to come to light. My personal opinion is that Blogger isn’t a good platform, and when I see a blogger using it, I feel like they are ruining their personal marketing by being associated with that site.

Yes, as a person looking to hire people, it is a bit shortsighted to skip over them based on the software they use, but it was something I didn’t really even realize I was doing until a few days ago. Since then, I have been working on giving people with Blogger hosted blogs a chance.

Surely, you can’t all say that none of you have ever thought less of a person based on something they did or didn’t have, did or didn’t say? Have you ever thought less of a person based on the company they keep? Well, to me this is something similar. I feel like the people I want to work with would have the good sense to use a more fully featured publishing system. Be it Typepad, WordPress.com, Movable Type, Expression Engine, or any of the other millions of blogging systems or content management systems out there in the world. Adding to that, I really don’t care what e-mail system people use. They could be using the worst e-mail client ever, but as long as it sends and receives just fine, that is all I care about.

Blogging requires more skill than sending e-mail. Understanding different blogging applications, can take time, and as an employer, I am in my full right to request that people at least have experience in the platform I am using.

And while I am trying to defend myself and look at things from a different point of view, my key issue can only really be solved by being proved wrong. Something which no one has gone ahead and done.

One thing that Jan Karlsbjerg did do was bring up a very interesting point:

How do you feel about folks who use Blogger and FTP to their own domain? Is it just the “blogspot.” string that turns you off?

Before, I probably would have clicked on their link to their blog and looked it over. I guess the issue really is that I don’t want to walk in their front door knowing that their house is made from mud. Weird analogy, I know…

Hopefully, that helps clarify things. I really do agree though that it would be shortsighted to not watch out for stars on Blogger, and I hope that I haven’t filtered out a rising star based solely on where they’ve decided to host their blog.

Originally posted on March 11, 2008 @ 11:09 am