Burningbird: Homeless Blogs

August 04, 2002

Homeless Blogs

Mike Golby ended one of his exceptional weblog postings with a rant: seems as if Blogger is misbehaving. Again. And when I clicked the permalink to copy the URL, the page below showed up. As Mike might say (just might, you know), seren-fucking-dipity.

Blogspot is failing, and it seems as if Blogger isn't much further behind. If these technical problems continue, we're looking at the potential loss of weblogs, and webloggers. As it is, as Mike points out, we're losing some lovely writing as post after post after post is lost.

I have my own server and use Movable Type, but I have several friends whose weblogging homes are in Blogspot, and whose blogging tool of choice is Blogger. I don't want to lose them, or even a letter of their writing. Their problems are my problems, too.

The sad thing is, Blogger is still the easiest approach to bringing new webloggers into the community. It's a no-cost, no-host solution that allows a person to try weblogging without any investment other than their time. For some people, low or no cost solutions are essential -- even 20.00 US a month can mean the difference between paying electricity or not for some members in our community.

(And as for those webloggers who shelled out for Blogger Pro, as I did, the frustration must be doubly painful. These people trusted Pyra to deliver a professional product and, instead, received a lot of new toys built on the same old problems. Not Good Business.)

Regardless of whether the weblogger eventually moves to MT or Radio or some other weblogging tool, we need to have a no-cost, non-technical solution for the newbies, or we're going to lose potential voices. Not to mention the voices of friends we've already made.

Bottom line: We -- the global community of webloggers -- can't afford to lose Blogger. However, I'm not sure we can afford to continue with it, either.

Posted by Bb at August 04, 2002 05:47 PM

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Comments

i moved back to the old blogger pro version 1.0 publisher a couple of weeks back (minus rss) and everything's ok. ish. i think blogspot may be where the problem is. as for blogger support, i don't even bother asking whenever i get a problem. that ain't good. anything else is beyond my ability. hope they sort themselves out.

Posted by: gary turner on August 4, 2002 06:11 PM

Well, I ponied up for blogger pro, but then I thought I should learn a little something about Radio (and a little is all I learned) but I'm not going back to blogger because of the downtime issues. Rather host it on my own site and use radio to post. Limits me though. Can only post from one PC right now.

Posted by: fp on August 4, 2002 11:50 PM

I paid for Blogger Pro and got just as many problems as before. It's a real shame because Ev has helped loads of us get started blogging but I've now got proper server space running MT and haven't looked back.

Posted by: The Obvious? on August 5, 2002 03:19 AM

Unfortunately, the bloghost companies are in a situation similar, if not identical, to that of the higher profile dotcoms that blew up last year and the year before (and continue to do so today). Their overhead exceeds their revenue stream, this is not a tenable position. Not that that helps people who are losing their carefully crafted posts/replies. I've seen similar issues with community sites that are not owned by large companies with extensive cashflow (about.com, etc) where the quality of the service continues to deteriorate and people who lack the funds/expertise to roll their own are left out in the cold. The digital have-nots. I'm not sure what the answer is.

Posted by: rev_matt on August 5, 2002 06:38 AM

One thing those of us who use MT and have sufficient extra bandwidth can do is host additional blogs, at the very least temporarily.

I can swing one or two; I got space, and I know perfectly well my visits aren't swallowing my bandwidth.

Possibly this is only a stop-gap, but it's better than nothing.

Posted by: Dorothea Salo on August 5, 2002 08:13 AM

Dorothea, I think your solution is a good one for the existing Blogger users in the neighborhood. I've also put our offers of hosting on my server, though I have to be a bit careful -- I also use my server for ThreadNeedle development and am not sure what resources will be used for this.

What I would like to see is webloggers contributing to a central fund that's used to lease servers capable of creating virtual web sites. Pre-installing MT on each server should take care of tech issues. Then give the sites away to newbies.

If the newbies stay with the weblog for six months, we could either help them move to their own hosting service, or they pay a small fee to continue the fund.

Webloggers helping webloggers.

If the newbiew

Posted by: Shelley aka Bb aka Master of this Domain on August 5, 2002 08:20 AM

An additional benefit to this approach is that there's less strain on Blogspot and Blogger, which would, hopefully, help it.

Posted by: Shelley aka Bb aka Master of this Domain on August 5, 2002 08:23 AM

I see over on Pagecount that you thought of MT multiple-blog-hosting before I did, Bb. Not that that surprises me. *grin*

The fund sounds like a good idea. Maybe we could get more alpha-bloggers to sign on? How much would something like this cost? (she asked ignorantly) And will the six-month nudge suffice to keep us from becoming another Blogspot?

Posted by: Dorothea Salo on August 5, 2002 09:08 AM

It seems to me if you could convince a few of the blogspot bandwidth hogs to move over to other hosting it would go a long ways toward easing the strain. I think those getting thousand's of hits a day and still on blogspot are the problem.

Posted by: Norm Jenson on August 5, 2002 12:28 PM