So, you’ve finally decided to create a blog (short for “weB LOG”), particularly a blawg. A blawg is a blog focusing on commentary about the law, generally written by a law professor, law student, or lawyer (see other blog-related terms at Wikipedia). You’ve finally hurdled the issue that lawyers don’t blog.

To start blawging, you need a blogging platform. I missed a step when I discussed search engine spiders, without first going into blogging platforms.

The Atty-at-Work started with i.ph, which is a great site. One reason is Pinoy pride – helping promote a .ph identity. By the way, there’s another Filipino blogging platform – Funchain. I haven’t tried it yet, but check the blogs of Bong Amora (OFW Empowerment) and Davao Councilor Peter Lavina to find out if Funchain is ok.

Going back to i.ph, there’s really no problem with its migration to Calliope version 2, although the Atty-at-Work opted to maintain the older version. Still, others believe that the migration has resulted in a mashup of social networking, publishing, and multimedia linking / hosting / aggregating applications” (read J. Angelo’s post).

It’s good to start with free blog platforms because, well, it’s free. Simply forget or delete the blog if it’s not working. Blogging, however, is addicting. Once traffic starts trickling in and the page rank goes up, it’s a waste throwing away the site. The tendency or challenge is to make it grow. An important factor crops up as readership increases – bandwidth. i.ph has a monthly bandwidth limit and a popular i.ph site may become inaccessible during the latter part of the month. THAT is bad for traffic. Now, there’s an upgrade to a premium account, but it’s hard to pay for something that’s free somewhere – wordpress, blogger and blogsome.

Wordpress is a great platform. This is the reason why this blawg and the Philippine e-Legal Forum are based on wordpress. Another blawger using wordpress is Atty. Cortes (Philippine Theo Law Gee).

Once hooked with blogging, it’s inevitable to tweak the codes and experiment with add-ons like sitemeters and adsense. You can’t have adsense on wordpress (the free one); not yet. The reward, really, is not the money (unless you’re in the league of Abe, earning enough in blogging to buy a car). Heck, blogging is anathema to time-billing, but just like the sitemeter, it’s fun and psychologically rewarding to see the site working and the figures going up, even in small increments.

Blogger is also a good platform. A great example is that of Dean Jorge Bocobo (Philippine Commentary). Unlike wordpress, blogger allows adsense, which is also true with another blogging platform – Blogsome. Major Tom (Citizen on Mars) is using Blogsome for his blog, which looks spectacular. You can play around with your codes in Blogsome.

This is based on personal experience. Just try out the different blogging platforms and find out for yourself (or try the tags below for related readings).

Reference Update: Blogging Wars – Wordpress vs. Blogger Part 1 (SiteReference)

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