A few weeks ago, Eric Goldstein, CEO of Clipmarks, invited me to his new website: Amplify. Amplify allows users to share clippings (like excerpts of text or images) much like Clipmarks, but encourages its users to comment on it and then the combined commentary and clipping are displayed together on a blog.

The uses are interesting. Amplify is a good way to quickly express an opinion on a topical issue and to share lesser known news stories. These can then be posted to Twitter, del.icio.us and/or Clipmarks through the site: maximising exposure.

The site also has a social element. You can comment on others posts and allow others to post on your ‘cliplog’, so many are ground cliplogs for specific projects etc.

WordPress MU is used so when you log-in, you face a familiar WordPress admin interface and you manage comments and users in the same fashion you manage WordPress users.

I like Amplify because it allows me to easily run a political blog (which can be seen here). I can clip stories that I want to share or discuss and write a minimal amount of opinion, but sufficiently communicate my viewpoint. I’ve even had a few complete strangers comment on my clips, and they’ve then retweeted them! It also displays retweets on the clipblog under comments.

Amplify allows users to log-in through Twitter’s OAUTH or to get their own account. Amplify, like Clipmarks, is well worth a look and is actually a really enjoyable but easy form of blogging.

Blogs are generally single author affairs, where the webmaster, marketer, writer and editor are one and the same. Perhaps this is something most associated with blogging, but I’m beginning to question whether it’s a good thing.

Maintaining a blog is a lot of work; you have not only to write but design, market, upgrade software, deal with email and moderate comments. A lot of work, is it not?

Blogging should be about posting; not designing and tiresome maintenance. So I’m finding my spell at gHacks pretty enjoyable; my posts may not be very frequent, but it feels like much less of a chore to write them as I know I don’t have to trawl through pages of maintenance when I open WordPress. I can post without worrying. That’s what blogging’s about.

Whilst creativity may feel somewhat lower, as one is concerned about editorial control, it (in a way) requires much less effort to write on someone else’s blog than your own.

Perhaps some hosted blogging solutions take the hassle out of maintenance, but marketing and negotiating advertising is still up to the blogger. That is not a stressless process, rest assured!

The question is, is it better to have a lesser workload or more control over content?

As a blogger, I must admit I sometimes become envious of those bloggers who make 6-figure incomes for content, which in my opinion, is no better than any of the decent blogs which I read but earn much less.

Why do we see some blogs, like TechCrunch, rise to such heights whilst other blogs, which definitely had the same potential, fail to? TechCrunch started at roughly the same time as mine, and whilst I doubt my blog even compares to TechCrunch, I do find it amazing how they progressed to such heights.

When a blog becomes as big as TechCrunch, the blog’s content does not matter and its audience has changed. No longer does TechCrunch appeal to the average fan of technology, in fact it only appeals to the masses of start-ups who aspire to be covered by TechCrunch. Even I, a Web 2.0 blogger, unsubscribed from TechCrunch years ago, because they seemed to have lost any interesting insight or coverage of non-highly funded start-ups.

Smaller blogs are more authentic. Smaller blogs, whilst their English might be subpar, provide more genuine opinions and cover more genuine topics, whether that be gadgets, politics or websites. Larger blogs have a tendency to only report high profile topics, like Apple and Google releases. Bloggers like me, on the other hand, will happily blog about any start-up or product we feel to be interesting, whether their capital be £0 or £9,000,000.

How on Earth does TechCrunch maintain 1253K readers? Frequent, ‘high quality’ content? Perhaps. But most blogs can achieve that with resources. And that’s why TechCrunch succeed: money. If a blog, like TechCrunch, gets lucky within its first few months and secures advertising, it continues to grow and can begin to employ other bloggers. Then it keeps growing.

Blogging has a lot to do with skill, but in my opinion a lot more to do with luck. Had I not got dugg a few years ago, I doubt I would still be blogging. My post was not fantastic; I was just fortunate that someone stumbled across it and liked it.

(And, by the way, congratulations to Robin Wauters of Plugg for getting a job at TechCrunch. Despite my criticism, it is still quite an honour to be able to write for such a big blog!)

I have neglected Webby’s World of late.

The reason, I keep claiming, is that I’m too busy in real life. My work load has suddenly increased and I’m not used to dealing with the quantity of work I have and writing high quality blog posts.

Some bloggers have it ‘easy’ in the time management sense. For probloggers, blogging quite simply is their life but the rest of us have to balance our life with blogging. I, quite frankly, am struggling to do this.

I’ve struggled for some time with finding time for blogging, which is definitely something I don’t want to abandon, and I’ve had several clever suggestions.

The suggestions range from doing extremely brief podcasts, handwriting posts and scanning them in to simply increasing my use of Twitter. For me, as clever as these suggestions are, they all have flaws compared to conventional blogging.

The idea behind all of these suggestions is to provide more frequent, but briefer, content. Which is better? In the long run, proper content holds more value; it will turn up on search engines (although posts like this quite possibly won’t) and it gives you more to look back on in hinesight. Yet, in the short term, more frequent content is probably better for the subscribers. It’s a difficult choice to make.

I’d rather provide lengthier posts. Not essay length. But this long. And no, I haven’t had the time to proof-read this.

I’ve used the Internet for about 10 years and I’ve had a website for about 8. I’m sure many of my memories are similar to other webmasters.

I decided to share some of the most interesting, and most embarrasing, memories of web ‘design’ and general use of the web which I have.

I think it demonstrates the progress I, and webmasters in general, have made that we’ve stopped some of these barbaric practices.

• Remember when you used a WYSIWYG editor? I used one called firstSite, which you can’t even buy on Amazon marketplace today. It was pretty user friendly though, having simple FTP as well as more complex facilities such as the ability to insert applets! Eventually, I progressed onto Dreamweaver and finally onto dynamic CMSes which didn’t even require an editor!
• Remember when you used your ISP’s free web hosting? I used NTL’s for quite a few years but I eventually needed more webspace and the ability to use PHP etc.
• Remember when you searched for free hosting, after you stopped using your ISP’s? I did, and I remember the number of ads I got. On the whole part, these free webhosts were pretty unreliable with the exception of Bravehost, who unfortunately filled my sites with lots of adverts.
• Remember when you used to have a guestbook? I had one which was always full of lots of spammy compliments which I naïvely believed!
• Remember when you tried to make a form for the first time? I do, and I remember wondering why it didn’t work. If only I realised I needed formmail, and a button why simply said ’submit’ wouldn’t do unless I made it POST.
• Remember when, after giving up making your own form, you turned to a site like Bravenet? I do. I remember using Bravenet for everything from site search to polls to guestbooks. The amazing thing is that Bravenet are still about, but now they call these ‘widgets’. How very 2 point oh of them.
• Remember when you used to use Blogger? Perhaps not, if you’re a blogger who started on WordPress.com, but I remember Blogger. Amazingly, it was probably much more flexible than WordPress.com but even self-hosted Blogger didn’t compare in flexibility to self-hosted WordPress. In all honesty, a CMS with pretty much no support for anything dynamic is bound to fail. I remember detesting Blogger’s comment system, as it had no Gravatar or TrackBack support, so I had to turn to HaloScan. Poor Azhar still uses it.
• Remember MovableType?
• Remember your first comment? Honestly, I can’t and my comments were lost in my MovableType to WordPress switch
• Remember when TLA worked? Before nasty Google started to penalise?
• Remember using blogging traffic exchanges, like BlogMad and BlogExplosion? A bit embarrasing, I know, but I came across Azhar, Paul, Danette and Sarah there… so it isn’t all bad! In all honestly, traffic exchanges gave me the initial readers I needed.
• Remember when some of the top blogs around were members of 9rules? Remember when Mashable, Rev2 and Paul Stamatiou were?
• Remember Solution Watch, which at one point was one of the most prestigious Web 2.0 blogs online?
• Remember when you used a desktop blogging client? For some reason, I thought it would be wise to do this until only a few months ago. Looks like I wasted $20 on ecto.
• Remember when you tried to get OS X running on your PC… back when Macs were PowerPC based.
• Remember before OS X existed and it could be argued that Macs were inferior to PCs?

Please excuse this awfully punctuated post, but if you have any similar memories feel free to add them to the comments.