Google Helps Offer Blogger Pro For Free

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!"

Comments

Re:Former members

[sinserve]

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."

Pro now free because they're not hurting for cash

[dw5000]

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. :)

Re:funny, except...

[RobotWisdom]

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.

They're just meeting the competition's prices

[hatless]

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.

Re:Google turning into Microsoft of Web Already?

[MonTemplar]

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.