I have been using WordPress for many years now. I firmly believe that there is no better software available, free or paid, for rolling your own blog. The guys over at Automattic are an amazing bunch of people for giving away free software that might otherwise cost thousands of dollars. But with all of that said I feel that there is a big gap that the blogging community must hurdle in order to become, well, more conjoined. When I am bored I tend to click around the Internet, read some blog posts, and occasionally comment on the ones that I feel are worthy. I have found that there is some great great commenting software out there that allows tracking of comments from site to site, but the same can’t be said for blogging.
Now, I may have missed the memo, but what blogging really needs is a centralized hub where I can easily search, comment and publicize the authors that I think are making strides in the vast online writing community that is the blogosphere. Up until this point I have had to keep a list of bookmarks for the blogs that I want to frequent, but why is that? Just as I am able to log on to Digg.com and given stories that I would like to read, I should be handled blog articles that are automatically aggregated utilizing the XML-RPC ping protocol that WordPress has seemingly kept infamous. I believe that the WordPress.com community is a step in the right direction when it comes to a blog community, but I do not want to be limited to having to open a blog on their host in order to be listed there. Part of the reason I love WordPress (the software) is that I like the freedom I am given when I am able to run my own host.
Well, those are just some thoughts of mine. I am sure that someone, somewhere, has been thinking the same thing that I have and is probably already hard at work on the next big thing when it comes to blogging communities. I just have not found anything that comes close to my vision of what the ideal would be. Someone surprise me.