A number of prominent web personalities have announced that they are going to redirect their personal blogs to their Google Plus pages – because they get so much more interaction with readers when they post there. I can understand that, but I’ll never do that with my blog. I have 3 times as many connections on Circles as I have RSS and email subscribers here (in 2 weeks, vs 5 or 6 years!) – but I’m not tempted in the slightest to give up what I have here. Perhaps it’s just about trade-offs and I’m not willing to give up the control I have over the way my personal site communicates with visitors.

I’ve got important things in the sidebar of my blog, for example. I like having my contact info, bio, links to information about my consulting practice and my media citations sitting right next to every article, no matter what readers came here to read. I don’t want to lose control over my own Information Architecture, no matter how under-developed it is, to Google’s vision of “posts in one tab and about page in another.” I want to put those things where I want, in the order I want and make them look however I want.

I’ve got some of my most useful posts on this blog pinned in the sidebar as well. Several of them are 3 or 4 years old. In the Plus world, those would be washed so far down the stream!

I like being able to choose what commenting system I use on my blog. I really like using Disqus because I can click on any commenter’s avatar and see what other Disqus-using blogs they comment on and how often. That’s a great way to get a quick picture of someone’s community of participation.

I like offering a search box, I use Lijit that searches my own personal blog archives and an extended network of sites I’ve identified (my tweets, my bookmarks, some of my favorite RSS subscriptions). I really doubt Google Plus will ever enable something like that.

Google Plus doesn’t have RSS feeds, or email subscription options. Both are important to me; I want to speak to my readers however they want to be spoken to. Some day, we’ll be able to write to and read from any platform in any other platform, just like we can call one phone network from inside another phone network now.

Rather than chasing people around from one platform to another, where they prefer to spend their time, I’m going to sit right here on a site I own and wait for the future to become interoperable with me!

WordPress plug-ins, the iPhone publishing app, the open source community, but more than anything my own control over how I present my self to the world – all those things are very important to me.

I do love Google Plus, though, and if you do too – here’s my profile there that you can add to a Circle so we can be Plusbuddies.