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!)

‘Blog in isolation’ published 25 reasons why we should use Disqus, the hot blog commenting community and management system of 20,000 blogs, which also isn’t short of funding. I, personally, don’t think it’s so ‘hot’ and I have a number of issues with the service.

Disqus looks nice, with threaded comments, shared profiles and email updates, but it hosts and manages your comments on an external site.

1. It will slow my site down

   Remotely hosting my commenting means that for them to be viewed, I have to download them from another website and call them from a remote database. This, surely, reduces performance and increases pageload time.

2. I don’t want to entrust my comments with someone else. They could get lost.

   If Disqus were to go bankrupt, what guarntees would I have that my comments would not be lost?

3. Many things Disqus provide have already been provided elsewhere.

   Shared profiles: TypeKey. Gravatars: Gravatars. Threaded comments: This plugin. Editable comments: This plugin.

4. Data protection.

   IANAL but surely it can’t be good to subject users to another privacy policy with servers in another jurisdiction. Who would be liable for any breaches in data protection?

5. Disqus is not open source.

   There is an API, but it isn’t open source. Is it ever wise to use a system of which you cannot see the technical basis?

6. It isn’t easy to migrate to and from.

   If I wanted to leave, I would have to find a way of transferring my comments. Disqus doesn’t complement your current comment system, like coComment does, but replaces it.

7. Disqus is a company. They want to make money. They could serve ads on your sites.

   Disqus have the technical capacity to serve adverts on your site, as they could put them in comments or send them along with the comments to be displayed. You’d have to trust them.

8. It is a fad which will probably fade out, meaning more work for you as you migrate back.

   Do you remember that fantastic coComment service we all used to use? Its Alexa rank says you don’t.

Most people would consider the term ‘business ethics’ oxymoronic, but I imagine most people wouldn’t find the term ‘blogging business’ oxymoronic at all. Personally, I hold the view that a blog shouldn’t be operated as a business, even if it does generate large amounts of money, but should be operated as a ‘blog’.

Businesses generally aren’t social. Businesses operate to make profit. A blog operates to talk the audience, which is social. Whilst being social and profit-orientated can co-exist in any business, I feel that a blog should be more focused on the audience (and the blogger’s creativity) than the pockets of the blogger/owner.

A blog shouldn’t have a business plan, it shouldn’t have numerical targets or specific ways in which to achieve those targets.

Sure, a blogger can have targets, but my binding themselves to numerical targets, I feel that this would increase pressure which would only result in deteriation of quality of blog posts. Strive for quality; don’t strive for 1000 people to read that article. Strive to write things you believe; not what makes you the most money or what is the most popular view.

For me, blogging is a hobby. I realise that to many, especially in one of my blog networks (Grand Effect), it’s a livelihood. I have massive amounts of respect for full-time bloggers for the simple reason that I don’t believe I have enough creativity to churn out a couple of pieces of quality work daily.

My blogging schedule rotates around my real-life, hence the lack of posts over the past week, whilst it must take an awful amount of self-disciple to rotate real-life around blogging. Perhaps that’s why many full-time bloggers see blogging as a business, but I think what inspires a great blog post is experience from the real world… something which you will see much less of if you’re a fulltime blogger.

The minute a blog turns into a business, it ceases being a truly ‘personal’ blog. It’s importan, even if you are blogging for money, that you never truly let your blog become a business and always keep it personal… something which is key to social media and blogging.