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Google Helps Offer Blogger Pro For Free

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the good-things-for-nothing dept.

Khazunga writes "News.com is reporting that the Google-owned Pyra are releasing the formerly-$35/year Blogger Pro weblog service for free. This is backed up by an announcement from Evan Williams at the Blogger Pro site, as well as a list of the newly free Blogger features. It's the dot-com frenzy all over again! Free services with no business plan... run for your lives!"

14 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. Livejournal is the standard by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2, Informative
    At least thats where the bigest amount of blogs are.

    --
    http://saveie6.com/
    1. Re:Livejournal is the standard by Zigg · · Score: 2, Informative

      Movable Type is most assuredly not Open Source.

      It does not matter for most people's use, but it's still incorrect to say that it is.

      </PEDANTIC>

    2. Re:Livejournal is the standard by Firehawke · · Score: 2, Informative

      It's not so much "snob-appeal" as finding themselves taking in more users than their hardware could handle. In the end, they had to limit things just to keep enough funding coming in to keep the servers running.

      Of course, you don't have to have an invite code if you pay for your account outright.

  2. Re:Former members by Timesprout · · Score: 2, Informative

    Google said it would give Blogger Pro subscribers either a $24 Blogger sweatshirt or a prorated cash refund. That offer is good through Oct. 1.

    --
    Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
    What truth?
    There is no dupe
  3. Re:Former members by sinserve · · Score: 4, Informative

    RTFA. It says "Google said it would give Blogger Pro subscribers either a $24 Blogger sweatshirt or a prorated cash refund. That offer is good through Oct. 1."

  4. Pro now free because they're not hurting for cash by dw5000 · · Score: 4, Informative
    At least, that's what the e-mail I got from Evan Williams said. His explanation:
    Pro subscribers helped keep us going as a struggling start-up, when servers and bandwidth were at an extreme premium. We wanted to keep basic Blogger free, but we needed to start charging in order to keep the lights on. So we built new things that would appeal to some Blogger users....

    Today, as you may know, Blogger's situation is much different. For one thing, we're part of Google.... Google has lots of computers and bandwidth. And Google believes blogs are important and good for the web.
    So, apparently, they have the money to offer the feature set of Pro to everyone. Good for them. (I moved to MT a few months ago for a number of reasons.) Those of us who paid the $35 got a nice parting gift. :)
  5. Whee! Funn Boggly Poast! by teamhasnoi · · Score: 2, Informative
    Uh, This marketbanker.com? If you view the source, they could use a meta tag or keywords or something...and marketbanker isn't really a name that I think of when I'm looking for text ads. I tried a few other things but it won't come up.

    A link(client/customer) of theirsPassthison.com made we want to kill and kill again, however. There's some javascript popup alert that comes up every time you roll over it. I happened to have the offending link positioned under the box, so every time I dissmissed it, another took its place with godawful inane sayings about 30 times before I was able to run away..

    I don't think Google *needs* to exibit monopoly power. The net has proved itself run by idiots, with tardy design skills.

  6. Re:funny, except... by RobotWisdom · · Score: 4, Informative
    A web journal is not the same as a weblog.

    Weblogs are annotated logs of web-reading, and are therefore outward-directed, with lots of links. Web journals are just self-directed diaries that happen to be posted on the Web.

    The explicit original purpose of weblogs was to make the process of finding good reading on the Web more efficient. Unintentionally, the main current purpose is probably spreading news items that the mass media self-censor.

    Wallowing in narcissism has nothing to do with weblogs, although the mass media have been propagating that slur since the earliest days.

  7. Re:archive? time capsule? by Dusabre · · Score: 2, Informative

    Seems you don't know much about Blogger. Blogger allows you to keep your stuff (all files, including web pages) on your own server. It actually encourages you to do so. Blogger basically just generates your html for you (and spell check and allows posting via a toolbar etc). You can arrange web space if you need it. Which is cool. No real risk if you don't want it.

  8. Re:LiveJournal is much more worthy of note by shione · · Score: 2, Informative

    you can try it here: livejournal test server

    You get the full privileges of a paid account to test out which is better than opening a free account on the main servers to test.

    Only disadvantage with the test server is your account could be purged anytime but that shouldn't be a worry if you're just testing how things work.

    enjoy :)

  9. Re:LiveJournal is much more worthy of note by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    I don't think "try before you buy" is really the intended purpose of the test server.

  10. They're just meeting the competition's prices by hatless · · Score: 3, Informative

    Movable Type--which has comments, RSS and Trackback by default--is free for personal use as long as you can do your own hosting. If you want a remotely hosted blog on their recently-launched TypePad.com site, you pay $5 or so a month.

    Blogger is now making comments, RSS and such free as long as you do your own hosting of the generated files. If you want a blog with these features hosted on their Blogspot.com site, you pay $5 a month.

    It's called responding to competition. With more and more blogging systems offering things like RSS and comments for free to people who posted to their own existing webspace, Blogger had to add those features to its free offering. The revenue is in hosting and ads and maybe in commercial licenses and services. I don't imagine that bring-your-own-hosting Blogger Plus was drawing too many new subscribers in recent months.

  11. Re:Google turning into Microsoft of Web Already? by MonTemplar · · Score: 3, Informative

    I very much doubt that Blogger & Google together could become the dominant force in the weblogging world. The appeal of Blogger is its simplicity and the fact that you don't need to have your own webspace up-front. MovableType is aimed at people who want to put a weblog onto their own webspace that runs from the webserver. Radio Userland, although it can give you webspace if you need it, will happily let you publish your weblog to your own site, with the content stored on your PC (I'm using it for my site). LiveJournal (the site) works in a similar way to Blogger, but you can take LiveJournal (the software) and use that on your own site.

    The idea that Blogger can somehow 'lock-in' the majority of content of the weblogging world is, to my mind, a bit of a stretch. It would require breaking the existing API, and possibly interfering with other technologies such as RSS, and would do more harm than good for both Blogger and Google.

    MT.

    --
    -MT.
  12. Re:funny, except... by RobotWisdom · · Score: 1, Informative
    How dare you try to define weblogging for the rest of us.

    Simply because I coined the term.


    (Heh.)