Blogger’s OpenID Is Not A Solution

Writing by Brick Marketing Staff on Sunday, 2 of December , 2007 at 9:15 am

(Source) Blogger in Draft now lets you enable OpenID-based commenting, in your blogs’ Settings | Comments tab:

This is one more reason I don’t like Blogger. Instead of fixing the problem with comments, the Google-owned Blogger team is just creating one more hoop for commenters to jump through in order for you to manage your blog. If you have a Blogger blog for your business, here’s why I think you should ditch it and take up using WordPress (not WordPress.com).

OpenID is somone’s uncanny way of talking people into one universal ID for the sake of convenience. Instead of having to use a thousand different logins (one for every website you register at), just use the OpenID and you can login anywhere you want. But it won’t work that way in practice and the reason is two-fold:

• First, OpenID will make it easier for some nefarious character online to steal your identity. No matter how secure it is, there is always somebody smarter than you who will be able to crack the code and take your ID and do some damage
• If you use the same nickname and password for all of your accounts anyway then OpenID is a non-issue. It’s only an issue for people who try to use their usual ID and password only to find that someone else has already taken it at the new social site that won’t be here next week. Find one original nickname that no one else is likely to use and make that your ID. Then you can use it anywhere and you’ll never forget it.

The problem with Blogger is that WordPress.org users can’t trackback and leave comments without jumping through hoops. It’s a fact that the more difficult you make it for your readers to leave comments on your blog, the less likely they will do so. Blogger makes it too difficult for me. Since I don’t have a Blogger account, I have “prove” myself every time I want to comment on a blog post. As a result, I don’t leave comments on Blogger blogs.

That’s bad for you.

The reason you want comments on your blog is because they help you with your SEO. Every comment left on your blog is more comment on that blog post page. If I’m addressing the topic then I’m likely using your keywords too. That’s more keyword-rich content, which helps you rank better in the search engines for that blog post. Why discourage me from helping you out that way?

If you’re concerned about spam, there are other ways of controlling it. WordPress has a great way of controlling spam by allowing WordPress users (I’m talking about WordPress.org, not dot com) the ability to require user IDs and passwords, but I wouldn’t suggest doing that too much. Don’t make your readers sign in every time they want to post a comment to your blog. Instead, set your WordPress settings to require every comment to be approved by a moderator. Additionally, get the Akismet plugin and install it. It will catch about 90% of your spam and discard it so that you don’t have to look at it. Now why can’t Blogger do that?

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