Tag: Blogger

Blogger Pro

I was reading through the featureset of Blogger Pro and although it does not meet my needs, it certainly does hit most of the things that anyone interested in just maintaining a weblog would need.

The thing that really made me take notice was something that Seth Dillingham had originally raised about Radio Userland — can they possibly build a sustainable business model on such rock bottom prices.

The planned price for Blogger Pro $50/year (per user). However! Since we are still building out the functionality, the cost will be $35* for a year for users who sign up now. (This cost will cover most users. See “Posting Limits,” below, for caveats.)

On the one hand, Blogger users now have a lot of free or near-free options to choose from, but on the other hand, $4/month for the service is ridiculously low. Maybe Pyra Labs feels it doesn’t have any choice but to offer it at that price, but I’d have gone for a much higher price — you can always come down with specials, etc. (especially given the publicity that Blogger is going to receive), but going up in price after you’ve realized you can’t offer support, etc. at those prices is a lot more difficult. And users will have higher expectations once they start paying for it, even if it is just $4/month.

The other interesting thing about the pricing scheme is the additional charges for heavy users,

It works like this: The base subscription price covers up to 100KB of posts per month. Each additional 100KB is $3. That number probably doesn’t mean much to you, but it’s substantially more than the vast majority of bloggers publish—even with multiple blogs—so you probably won’t have to worry about it. For those who do, what we do is keep track of the length of all the posts on all the blogs you own (i.e., you created) for the month, and as you are approaching 100KB, you’ll get a warning. Once you’ve reached that limit, to post more stuff, you’ll need to approve a $3 charge for an additional 100KB. You’ll never be charged or billed without specifically approving it.

Interesting. Again, I’d build a higher charge right into the system. BTW, I was curious so I brought up my text file for this week — I posted 112KB worth of material to my web sites this month. I guess I’m finally an overachiever at something! My mom will be so proud! (Now to slink back into slacker mode).

The Revolution Will Be Blogged

It is hardly the first such look, but WebReview
has a nice piece on the web logging phenomenon, The
Blogging Revolution. To my mind, web logging (blogging for short) is here
to stay and makes the Internet far more interesting.

Much of the media coverage of blogging treats it as a new phenomenon, but in
reality it goes back to before the web was born when Tim Berners-Lee saw the
web as integrating both content creation and browsing. Unfortunately, Mosaic,
Netscape, Microsoft and others delivered only half a solution — the browsing
part — but didn’t integrate any decent creation tools into the browser.

Today, however, there are starting to be an abundance of creation tools that
integrate with the browser — really are the browser. Blogger
is the best known of these. Blogger makes it trivially easy to keep a running
commentary news site. I used it for about three months at the end of 1999 to
keep my sites updated and found it an excellent tool for blogging. The only
drawback is it does not have more advanced content management features, but
most of its audience probably does not need those.

The tool I am currently using, Conversant,
not only lets me update my site daily but it lets me manipulate those daily
updates in ways that Blogger cannot. I can take this page, for example, and
make it appear as any number of static URLs, or include it as part of a newsletter
page, along with other entries, on making web sites.

But the point is not Blogger vs. Conversant (they are different tools suited
for different purposes), but rather what has come to be the traditional paradigm
of web sites, the .com phenomenon, with grassroots shoestring operations. The
conventional wisdom 18 to 24 months ago was that the corporate suits had all
but taken over the web. Boo.Com, Salon.Com and other top flight sites were going
to push the little guy aside. Instead, the little guy (or gal) is back with
a vengeance.

I have been arguing from the time I sent my first e-mail message back in the
early 1980s that the Internet is pretty much going to destroy the traditional
media model. Look, I want to buy my shoes from Nike, but I do not exactly want
to sit around talking to Philip Knight or his cronies for conversation. I think
Salon.Com is easily the best online magazine out there, and even it comes across
as boring and pretentious most of the time. It is better than most of the print
crap out there, but I actually spend more time reading blogs maintained by one
or two people in their spare time than I do reading Salon.Com.

Blogs also solve one of the problems that plagues traditional media — with
Blogs there is instant peer review. I watch a lot of television, for example,
and constantly see talking heads make basic errors of fact or reasoning. Writing
a letter of complaint to a major network to point out an error is a severe waste
of time. With a Blog, though, I can instantly link to the offending passage,
point out the error, and let readers decide. The person making the statement
may choose to respond in similar fashion. Contrary to the popular opinion that
online communities generate more errors, my experience is that they are no more
factually challenged than traditional media, plus they include tools to make
it easier to catch and track errors.

As the tools to create web sites become simpler and cheaper (could it be any
cheaper to create a web site?), the problem for media corporations needing to
make millions in advertising is going to skyrocket. This may be a pie-in-the-sky
prediction, but I think it is likely that in another 20-25 years the current
media system — where large conglomerates merge with each other to take advantage
of scales of economy — will gradually give way to a grand dispersal of the
media where a typical person’s daily newspaper is half a dozen small independent
feeds collated together rather than the product of a single business entity.

Why not beat the rush and try out Blogger or Conversant or even Manila.
They are all free, and do a good job of making blogging a cinch.