Okay so everyone is familiar with microblogging services such as Twitter. In fact many people only know of Twitter as the only service in it’s space. There are many others. But they are pretty similar in functionality. You Microblog and create a following which gives it a social media spin. You are given a username and a url of something like this… twitter.com/chasesagum where you post your “tweets” or microblog posts in hopes of being viewed by thousands.

But this is only part of the story when it comes to microblogging. This is what we call Public Microblogging through a 3rd party service. In the blogging world this could be compared to Blogspot or Blogger where you depend on that service to host and distribute your information. But what if you want to host your own? People can host their own blogs with software like Wordpress rather than being compelled to use Blogger. Why can’t people host their own Microblogs? You can!

Wordpress + Microblogging = the P2 Theme

There are many ways to accomplish this, but right now I want to concentrate on one. That same open source application that has changed the blogging world forever, i’m speaking of Wordpress here, is now giving us the chance to host and customize our very own microblogs. The wonderful Wordpress team Automatic has created a theme for Wordpress called the P2 Theme. This theme effectively turns your Wordpress blog into a Microblog. I immediately knew this was huge as soon as I came across it and started building my own. See csagum.com for my microblog. I’m using this p2 theme.

There are so many uses for having your own self hosted Microblog rather than having just a Twitter account. In the Wikipedia page about Microblogging there are 3 specific issues specified about the current problems with Microblogging. These 3 issues are:

1. Privacy – concerns of broadcasting social or work information to everyone who follows your feed
2. Security – concerns of the public seeing possible sensitive work information
3. Integration – how to adapt microblogging into the corporate culture.

Your own microblog using the open source Wordpress CMS would effectively eliminate all 3 of these issues. It will be interesting to see how many people in the coming months begin to setup their own microblogs!