The question is no longer: "Typepad, Blogger or @WordPress?"

On New Year’s Eve, while having a sauna alone I got a couple of ideas for blogging.

I should really move to WordPress. The question is no longer: “Typepad, Blogger or WP?” But rather: “Posterous, Tumblr or WP?” While Posterous and Tumblr may be easier to use, the main reasons for going with WP are:

• It’s free as in “speech”;
• It’s free as in “beer”;
• WP the company has recently transferred the WP brand name to WP the foundation;
• I could host it myself if I wanted to (and I might);
• It has a huge user and developer base;
• I have seen reasonably nice layout templates lately.

Hesitations:

• The effort involved in migrating my Typepad blog content to WP;
• What will happen to the URLs? Will they all stay intact and work after domain mapping?
• What will happen with the images and files that I’ve uploaded to Typepad? And to the URLs pointing to them? (BTW: this concern should prompt me not ever to upload images or other files to blog tools ever again. Instead use embed code, pointing to such objects on other services; just like with the videos)
• Dave Winer made a good point after talking with WP’s Matt Mullenweg: There is something not-this-century about having a content management interface which looks different from the published content. Generations of people who’ve become familiar with the Web through services like Facebook don’t understand why all isn’t WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get).

Reasons why I would want to host it myself:

• If something bad happened to WP the company, I would not only “own” but indeed have my own data;
• I can probably arrange my domain mapping for a better price than at http://wordpress.com (maybe via Google);
• Self-hosting allows for more flexibility in features and modules, compared to http://wordpress.org, where availability of features depends on approval by committee.