One of the strongest (I thought) arguments I presented to anyone who would listen in favor of getting a domain was simple: Your e-mail address is portable and pretty permanent.

Buy domain mydomain.com, and set up a me@mydomain.com address.

As long as you keep paying the registration fees for the domain (which keep dropping) and hosting fees (dropping with more features as time goes by), your e-mail never changes.

It’s like cell-phone number portability: You can move from Sprint to Verizon and keep the same number. Yeah, you’re paying someone else and there’s a different feature set, but this is all transparent to people who call you. All they care about it not having to remember/reprogram your number every year or two. That’s annoying…

With the rise of more powerful – and increasingly free – online e-mail systems (Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and so on), the argument for a domain so you have a permanent e-mail address is a little less compelling today than it was about 10 years ago, but the get-the-domain-for-email-alone argument still holds some water, for the following three reasons:

• Will [portal company]’s free e-mail be around in 10 years? Will [portal company] still exist?
• With the free services, it’s kind of tough to get a tim@portal.com address. Usually more along the lines of timmcwilliams99@portal.com. You’ll remember it, but not easy for friends.
• The access-anywhere nature of portal account is a powerful sell, but virtually all hosts offer web mail tools (though few are of the caliber or Gmail, for example – let’s be honest).

But I’m spozed to be talking about bloggers, right?

OK, same arguments apply, for the most part. Get an address and keep if forever, even if you shift your hosting every year. This is terribly important if you want to be a top drawer blogger.

The best anti-example I can think of in this respect is Dan Gillmor, one of the best tech journalists out there. Formerly with the San Jose Mercury paper, he left to do what he terms citizen journalism.

OK.

Now, I try to read him whenever I can, but it’s tough to keep up with him – and imagine what the search engines have to deal with. Lots of Gillmor deadends in the indices.

Here’s what I can recall of where his blog was (and this just in the last couple years):

• Some location on San Jose Mercury site
• After he left the paper, he put up a Typepad blog
• Then to his new startup, Bayosphere
• Now he’s moved to a new place, part of backfence.com: Dan Gillmor’s Blog

This ‘taint conducive to keeping readers.

I understand some of the reasons – integration with other sites, both look and content, corporate rules and so on – but it’s a shame. It’s hard to follow him; I have to keep changing my blogroll to reflect his new location (not changed to latest location yet…); Google results will show a lot of redirects and so on.

If he was always “dangillmor.com,” well, that’d work better.

Another one I still can’t understand is Robert Scoble, the evangelist from Microsoft. He was on some Manilla system that he outgrew, so he moved to WordPress – but HAS NO domain. He’s just scobleizer.wordpress.com.

Why not just get “scobleizer.com” (if available) and use WordPress to publish to hosted domain? Yes, some functionality is lost – another argument for non-domain publishing – but, still.

Pick an address/domain. Keep doing whatever you want to the backend/hosting; keep the front end – i.e. how to find you – simple for your readers/users/friends.

Both of them.

(off the soapbox…)