STEEMIT VS WORDPRESS

Some people are saying “Steemit will replace Wordpress”. But I think they can co-exist happily, and I plan to keep using both.

Image originally from here

At this point Steemit looks to me to be a whole new technology, a complete paradigm shift. It might be compared to home computers, the internet, or the printing press. Those are some very game changing inventions, and at this point I’m thinking Steemit is possibly the next big thing, I’m very impressed with it, and I want to be a part of it.

Meanwhile, Wordpress is still a very useful and well designed tool that I use everyday and greatly appreciate. It’s more like a fridge, a car, Microsoft Office, or a cordless power tool set. It does a whole bunch of really useful stuff. When the internet took off in the late 90’s, people didn’t stop using their kitchens or their sheds.

Steemit is evolving at the speed of light, and it’s very hard for most people to envision what it might become. To do that pretty much requires being a visionary. So I’ll just predict that it will grow a lot bigger, very rapidly, and leave it at that.

Meanwhile Wordpress has evolved more gradually over the past 10 years. It’s gone from being just a blogging platform, to being arguably the best website management system on the internet. If I was recommending a way for anyone to design a website I’d say go with Wordpress.

Two important things I can do on Wordpress that I can’t do on Steemit.

First and foremost, I can plagiarise! On Steemit I have to produce new original content. I have to actually type out a bunch of words on my keyboard. On my Wordpress blog I can just copy and paste stuff. And sometimes that is exactly what I want to do. (A bit like buying vegetables from the supermarket rather than growing them in the garden – they may not be as good, but we can’t do everything)

For example, as I’m sussing out Steemit, I keep seeing really useful stuff that other people have written and posted on Steemit. I want to compile some of that stuff in one convenient place. So I can copy and paste it to a Wordpress blog post. Not much of the post is original, but it has the information I’m looking for, and in a year or so it may pull in a truck load of traffic. Some of the people who see it may even find it useful.

And secondly, on Wordpress I can create my own style and identity – I can have a black and blue website, with my own menu system, and set up everything to my own taste. It may not be world changing like Steemit, but it’s my own little corner of the internet.

So essentially, to me Steemit and Wordpress are as different as my desktop computer and my Android tablet. I enjoy using both for what they are best suited to and have no desire to replace one with the other.

While it’s true that everything I post here on Steemit will probably later end up on my Wordpress website, they are two very different and entirely complimentary environments. Wordpress is not some sort of enemy to be defeated – it’s an absolutely brilliant tool, and I can’t speak highly enough of it. (We are not talking about Facebook here - Facebook sucks and deserves to be shoveled into a bin and dumped).

Wordpress is awesome. I won’t call my Wordpress website a blog because the blog part is only one section of the site – there are around 90 full size pages along with over 200 blog posts in there. My site pulls in millions of page views (about 25 million so far), and although it doesn’t really pay me anything, it’s my own public creative space that I’m very attached to.

When I do a Google search for “Steemit” within New Zealand, the top four search results and the vast majority of the images in image search are all from my Wordpress site - http://www.frot.co.nz (No Steemit post results come up because Steemit isn’t a NZ site)

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SIFT666 aka Ian Gregson is a professional Wordpress blogger and crypto-currency investor from Wellington, New Zealand.

In between photographing penguins and eating organic meat products, he likes to read Wordpress blogs about printing presses and is currently developing a new website portal to rival Steemit called http://www.frot.co.nz

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