Is Surrogate Blogging via Google Plus a Good Idea?

I recently came across this discussion on Google Plus (G+) about Kevin Rose's decision to stopp using his personal blog in preference to G+. He is now redirecting all visitors to his blog to his G+ profile. Within G+, well-known tech leaders such as Bill Gross and Paul Allen (not of Microsoft fame) have both indicated that they are seriously considering doing the same thing.

What does this mean for blogging? Is this a bad portent for blogs? Is it wise to use surrogate platform owned and controlled by a third party for your content creation and sharing platform?

Long-form Versus Short-from Content

Personally, I do not believe that G+ is the proper venue for long-form articles. The thin-columnar design would make it tedious to read posts longer than a few hundred words. My following major thought pieces would not be practical to post on Google+:

My four-part Smartup series, Web 3.0: Powering Startups to Become Smartups
A Flock of Twitters: Decentralized Semantic Microblogging
Flowing Your Identity Through the Social Web
The Web is Not (yet) Social
It's Time for Blogging to Evolve

Another issue with redirecting a personal URL, a blog for instance, to G+ is that you lose your Google juice. Whereas it might not be a big issue to people like Kevin Rose and Bill Gross who have significant audiences on most (all?) social networks, to a lesser-known entrepreneur like me, the loss of PageRank would be significant blow to my reach. Along with draining your juice by redirecting a blog to G+, you would be orphaning all your past content as the links would no longer work and people would not have a way to read your past posts and articles.

Finally, there is the issue of giving up control of your content. Althought Google+ does have some facility for data portability, as an open source advocate and W3C invited expert on Social Media Federation, I do not relish the idea of given up control over my content to a 3rd party.

Are There Any Upsides?

Those are the downsides to relegating your blog to the back burner. The upside is this. The benefit of social networks over blogs is that an individual can follow many people at once, thus subscribing to numerous content pipes without having to visit numerous, disconnected sites (i.e. blogs). With blogging, each visitor has the option to subscribe to your feed but it is only one feed. That makes it less likely that you'll have return visitors. RSS is (was?) a fantastic tool, but I have not had any new subscribers to my blog in many, many months.

Perhaps using G+ for shorter-form posts could noticeably increase your reach. It might even motivate people to visit your blog more frequently.

Whereas short-form content may be at home in a venue like G+, I still believe longer-form articles need a better place than G+. But, in the past, I would have posted these thoughts on my blog but instead I have written them in G+. So maybe the times they are a changing.

Note: This was original published just on my G+ account. But after thinking about it awhile, I decided to post these thoughts in my blog as well. Now, will Google penalize me for duplicate content?