MySpace blogs used to allow you to see who your subscribers were, to see how many visits your blog had had in the last day or week, and to syndicate your work elsewhere. The content of the blog could use the entire width of the screen. The blog would receive some random visits from people who were attracted to the title or topic, just because it was part of a social network which also included a large number of musician and artist pages. The “kudos” mechanism, similar to but not linked to FaceBook’s “like” mechanism allowed you to let your friends know when you had read the blog, and the comments allowed you to post long responses in such a way that they appeared with the original blog post. All that has now been eliminated or messed up to such an extent that I feel I must move my writings elsewhere.
A couple of months ago, I used a free tool called MySpace Blog Exporter 2.1 to turn my postings at http://www.myspace.com/nhpeacenik/blog/
up to that time into an xml file that could be imported into my WordPress blog ( http://halfredhouse.biz/wordpress/). Now that application has ceased to work, apparently because there is now no longer an rss interface to MySpace blog content.
Some of my MySpace friends have started blogs using BlogSpot, Blogger, or WordPress and now post only “teasers” to the MySpace blog, with a link to the actual blog. This may be a useful idea. but it involves extra work, and MySpace may take away the ability to put links into blog postings at any time. Individual blogs are not socially linked in the way MySpace blogs are, and it takes a lot of effort to “promote” them. Need I mention that FaceBook and Twitter have no real blogging support at all, since they are designed to transmit short pithy (and usually either witty or caustic) messages rather than longer pieces requiring preparation and thought. LiveJournal is practically ideal for posting this kind of longer blog, but it tends to be more a world of its own, where readers need to join in order to fully participate, and its user-base (in the English speaking world at least) is much smaller than that of MySpace.
I guess I’ll port the last few of my blog postings, laboriously by hand, to my WordPress blog and start using the MySpace blog only to post teasers, similar to “bulletins” from now on. It’s so sad that MySpace had a somewhat rickety platform that served many of us so well for years, a platform that could have been shored up and improved carefully and gradually. Instead, it opted to replace that platform with a funhouse hall of mirrors that leads nowhere but to pages full of advertising for “stuff” and promotions for corporate media.