The Rogue Rhetorician blog is migrating to WordPress.
I established this blog to explore the academic discipline of rhetoric in the context of the online revolution. If I want my words to have any influence on educators and students, the words must be read.
Since 2005, this blog has resided on Blogger, a platform that once defined the nature of Web logs… weblogs… blogs. The Web (I still prefer the proper noun form) evolves quickly, with innovators replaced by those who do the same thing better. Yahoo and AltaVista were replaced by Google. Friendster and MySpace were replaced by Facebook. And Blogger? It was replaced by WordPress some time ago.
The transition will require some time, but it was overdue already.
There is irony in a rhetorician specializing in new media and issues of economy responding slowly to trends. I can offer excuses for remaining on Blogger too long. I hoped Google would breathe some life into Blogger. The idea that my blogs might be there for decades was comforting. It was free and stable, too.
Running our own WordPress installation on a hosted server means that when we stop paying for the server, all could be lost. That’s why we adopted MarsEdit with its archival system for blog posts. It’s important to have archives.
WordPress allows us to promote posts via other social media, including Facebook and Twitter, leading to yet more readers and more influence. Blogger could promote easily to Google+ and the handful of regular readers on that platform.
Follow the audience, reward the audience, and build a larger audience.