TypePad and Blogger Compared

Without wanting to risk a flame war from the SixApart employees who magically turn up everytime I comment on something related to them anywhere in the blogosphere, I think the comparison is, quite simply daft. TypePad is better compared to an alternative paying service (like perhaps one of the Blogware powered paying services), and Blogger would be better compared to MSN Spaces or another free provider. Its really like comparing an Apple to an Oranges.

Whatever they do, Sixapart has a huge impact on the blogging scene in Europe, thanks to Loic I assume. While blogging is still not that popular over here (at least from my point of view) – perhaps because we don’t have the same political bloggers – Typepad is adding blogs with big names and companies.

But Duncan is right, it must be compared to MSN Spaces and Yahoo rather than a paid service. On the other hand: Sometimes you have to compare free with little payed.

First, my sincerest thanks, Darren, for the great resources you provide at problogger.net.

I read back through my post and realized I should make a quick disclaimer before you read this: I don’t work for Blogger, own Google stock, or even know a single soul at Blogger or Google. :)

Regarding the topic of Typepad vs. Blogger, are you aware of any reviews that don’t focus on the technical aspects of the two when comparing? From my sales and marketing perspective the real value to me is which platform will be the most effective tool to get messages and encourage interaction with the broadest possible audience of prospects.

In my relatively new foray into blogs as a strategic marketing tool, I’ve chosen blogger as the platform of choice, for myself and clients, primarily because of it’s intuitive admin interface designed with the non-technical user in mind. In this review, CNets states, “Beginners will love Blogger’s ease of use and the fact that it’s free. However, professionals should look elsewhere.”

This begs the questions: Isn’t ease of use for beginners a good thing? To exactly what type of professionals are they referring?

I think there is a misconception that Blogger is ONLY a free service serving up 15 template choices to be hosted on Blogspot.com. While a majority of Blogger bloggers might fit this profile, Blogger offers the benefit of easily being hosted on your own server and completely and seamlessly integrated into custom web sites alongside almost any other feature imaginable. (I don’t work for Blogger…really!)

More importantly to me, I’ve had great promotional results using Blogger (in all fairness, I don’t have any TypePad applications to compare it to) … achieving a pagerank of 4 within 8 weeks on my company’s primary blog that was integrated into a web site only a few months old. We also have seen a significant percentage of new traffic being directed to the rest of our site from this application.

So, the purpose of my post is to ask if anyone is aware of a review of TypePad and Blogger (and/or whoever) that focuses on the effectiveness in achieving communication goals vs. just the technical features?

Thanks in advance,

-dc