– a quora.com subdomain of your choice
– set a title, logo/avatar image and #blog description
– choice of set of basic categories that show up on the right side of the pages, acting as navigation links to your blog’s archives
– categories are linked to Quora existing set of topics
– your blog posts can be linked to either your main categories or other Quora topics
– limited HTML editor for your posts
– statistics on views per post, with monthly archives, including which specific users viewed your posts
– multiple authors per blog allowed
– easy posting via the mobile app
– you can use your Quora credits to promote your posts
– your posts show up in the home pages of people who follow the topics of your posts
– up/down voting and comments on posts
– choice of 2 quite elegant themes (see the default one in the screenshot of my blog)
I’ve been using #Google + as a blogging platform, so here’s how it compares:
– an existing audience: no need to build up a fellowship through Circles or join #Communities (to which you can’t cross-post). Tagging to Quora’s topics will give your posts a chance to being visible to hundreds if thousands of topics.
– a topic-based audience: the G+ experience is based on following people, while on Quora on following topics
– a different audience: while G+ tries to market itself as everything for everyone, it is mainly focused on images, from great photography to silly GIFs. Quora is focused on text and analysis (top currently trending topics are “smart people”, “human behaviour” and “computer programming”) which, as you can imagine, has implications on the topics that have the bigger audiences. Quora also has a small army of admins and reviewers who have created a culture of quality content. If you have such content, it should thrive on Quora
– a better editor: although limited ( no source editing), you have an actual HTML editor, can add multiple images anywhere in your post and can have actual links not just drop URLs in your text.
– social propagation: on G+ people can re-share your posts, increasing your audience. Comments and +1’s though are mainly done on the copied posts. On Quora, there is no sharing feature (posts have Facebook and Twitter share buttons of course) but when someone follows your blog or a post (similar to subscribing to the comments) or comments to / votes up a post, a related “story” is shown on the user’s followers home page as well as the user’s profile page.
– statistics: on G+ you have no statistics on whether your posts where read at all. You can only get a total view count on your photos based on third-party sites that use the G+ API or through Picasa. On Quora you get a full listing of who viewed (if they have turned on the related privacy setting) each posts, and how many views you have today as well as per month.
So where do all that leave me with the original question? As you can guess from all of the above, I’m quite positive about it. Of course, I’m not replacing G+ with Quora, I’ll be cross-posting though, you can find me (and see a live example of how the system works) here http://bit.ly/g-quora
In the end, I think there is indeed a big difference in the audiences of the two platforms, so there is no harm done from the “both” choice. What do you think? :)