Sunday, January 20, 2008

Privacy..which to you prefer?

There are different ways to make blogs or posts private.

In Blogger you can make your blog open to all or open to invitations only. It affects the entire blog. The cool thing for readers is that their google password works for all the private blogs. There are no extra passwords to remember. If you read by surfing, this is convenient. You are logged into google, and the blogs let you in just like any other blog. However, surfing is the only way to get there. No notice shows up in readers. There is no way to know if someone has updated except by surfing (although there is a way to set it up so that posts can be emailed to readers).

In Wordpress you can password protect individual posts. Those posts show up in readers just like everything else, except that they say "protected" and you have to know the password to see the content. Each blog has its own password. Now once again, the computer seems to be able to recognize people and remember that you are a password holder. If it forgets, then you have to remember the password for each of the blogs that you read, or ask the writer to give it to you again.

I keep track of my blogs via a reader, so as a reader, I prefer the Wordpress option.

Which do you prefer?

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous7:17 PM

    I have just about everything down to one password and it really needs to stay that way! The less I have to remember, the better my chances for success!

    ReplyDelete
  2. As a reader, I would prefer individually password-protected posts to an entire private blog. This is because I have different levels of engagement with each blog I follow. There is a level where I either know the blog's owner in real life, or I "know" them well enough online (through exchanging comments, etc.) that I feel comfortable contacting them for a password. Then there's a level where I enjoy reading the blog, want to follow it, but haven't interacted with the blog's owner and therefore feel awkward about e-mailing her/him out of the blue and saying "Hey, you don't know me, but how about giving me a password to read your most intimate thoughts?" If a blog like that goes private, I'll probably stop reading it rather than ask for the password, and therefore I'll miss out on everything that person writes, including perfectly innocuous posts about what s/he had for lunch. So, I'd rather have a system where the personal stuff is protected and the okay-for-public consumption stuff is out there for the reading. (In fact, I've considered permanently moving my own Blogger blog to Wordpress because I like the idea of having that selective control.)

    ReplyDelete

Comments will be open for a little while, then I will be shutting them off. The blog will stay, but I do not want either to moderate comments or leave the blog available to spammers.