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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!"
What about disecting your blogs and turning it into digestable infor they can sell?
If you take a tour on their site you will find out that they do make money - its not that obvious like on any other banner/pop exploded site, but they put small ads here and there, they offer PRO services for businesses where they sell servers and services... They make money without annoying the surfers and its very rare thing to find on the net.
Dont just mail it - Maileet
Those Free features are really nice, but these features didn't even take that long to code in, except for the spell checker. It's like AOL saying they are offering free smilies on their email :).
Google has quite a following but this sure as hell couldn't hurt their image. There are so many users that default to MSN search because that's all they know. Getting their name out there for more that just searches to the common users is going to help them establish even more dominance.
Has google ceased to index blogs with the rest of the web? I know there was some grumbling in the past months about this.
I just got an account on the freeware blogger from google. The PRO was down. I don't think I would have paid for the "pro" features. Just like I wouldn't pay for a free email box.
Blogging is the online method of talking to the bartender. It's kind of relaxing... until you realize you have no idea who you are talking to.
-- No sig for you!
I think Google, being in the unique position of controlling what most people see on the web, sees anything that improves the web in general as improving their service. In particular, blogs are a great source of links to popular and useful sites for Google's PageRank algorithm to work with. That means more accurate and relevant Google results. As crazy as it sounds, this may just be a move by Google to try and make blogging more popular, because it has the side effect of improving their service. Also, blogging involves people in the web community, where they will inevitably come to rely on Google as we all do.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
And as we all know, quantity DOES equal quality - especially in the world o' blogs. ;-)
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I know it might sound a bit strange to you, but:
;)
2. Increase the market share by flooding the market with free software.
This business model works when you can find a way to extend your other business in the new market share conquered. A typical example(but not very successful) is Netscape. Hotmail is always free and it's good to remain free for the sales of other products, e.g. Outlook.
Some business still execute this kind of plan even after the big boom. Those companies which failed with this business model during the boom is due to the fact that they don't have any concrete plan to make use of the advantage of high market share earned. (or the VC money arrive before they could make a plan
i don't understand how people will use some commercial website to put down personal information.
there's 2 good reasons why anyone would want to have a blog or diary:
1. one of the reasons i keep a journal or diary is because at some future point in my life i would like to look back and have memories brought back to me that i may have forgotten.
2. another reason is i am constantly moving around the world and i like to have a central place where my friends and family can keep updated on my activities.
using a commerical blog application satisfies requirement number 2, but what about number 1?
blogger won't be there forever, one day they will disappear. it may not be this year, or next or even in the next decade, but they will disappear or change in some way at some time.
when this happens, what about all your data? how is your data formateed? will they send you your data back to you in some comma delimited format? who knows?
that's not good enough for me. i wrote my own to satisfy my own requirements. if you don't want to write your own, there's plenty of free and open ones on sourceforge.net.
remember, when using a public service to keep your personal information, think about the future for that information.
Of course it doesn't--but LiveJournal is happily Open Source. :)
spelling has nothnig to do with intelligence.
-pyrrho
Firstsly, personally I am not really into the "blogs". Despite my thinking that the whole term is retarded; the segregated and "showtime" nature of that particular slice of the net doesn't apeal to me much.
However sites like Livejournal rock. Sure there are tons of young girls and boys out there looking for an outlet for their typical teen angst and there are just as many people using as a hookup service (luckily friendster is taking over that function nicely).
The saving grace is for groups of friends. Thanks to my working in the Internet world as do many of my friends we have found ourselves scattered all over the place. By using livejournal as a replacement for the group emails we have now made easily searchable, archived places to communicate. This works out a lot better than lists ever did because people are more open on something they can call their own private place. Comments allow easy flow of conversation and links back. Also it removes the time constraints found on emails, usually if someone doesn't reply in a day or so no one else is even following that thread anymore. Finally the whole friends of friends thing has introduced me to a lot of great new people who I never would have met before.
Most of those who are so quick to pan are the typical elitists who can't find anything good in a thing unless it is something they personally use or participate in.
--- I do not moderate.
Okay, I don't quite understand the logic of this though. If Pagerank(tm) is supposed to be built off people linking a site because they recommend, aren't blogs a key tool in it? I've always seen Pagerank and a very grassroots tool; it uses people on the Web to suggest things. If thy separate blogs from searches and presumable Pagerank also, who's left to link sites for Pagerank, the corporate business sites? That doesn't seem too useful to me, and seems to open the whole thing up to corporate abuse.
Random rants about technology: http://technorants.blogspot.com
If this blog site gets overwelming market share over the other free journal sites out there, google would have achieved it by the users signing up on their own free will. Internet Explorer's market share came when they started bundling it with the OS. Users didnt have to do anything except upgrade their OS and it would be there whether they wanted it or not.
This doesn't make any sense, to take a small, profitable bit of software (not profitable enough to offset bandwidth charges perhaps but it was making money) and then start giving it away-- this is obviously a move to kill the marketshare of products like Movable Type which has a commercial and non-commercial license and Radio Userland which I think is purely commercial-- so that users will use Google's blogging system in preference to probably AOL Journals, another free system that seeks to wipe-out the marketshare of another popular blogging or "Journal" system, LiveJournal .
I'm not saying that competition is bad-- but history has shown us that anyone giving something away of a class that was previously valued for real money is typically doing it for anti-competitive reasons. It might not be long before something like:
becomes something like:The collective Internet should reevaluate models like Freenet and make a "weaker," more light-weight distributed peer-to-peer information distribution system-- its weaker because you simply don't need the overhead of hardcore anonymity and privacy because pretty much all of the users will want to be "found" by those reading on the Internet. Google's got enough brains to figure out how to make that searcable so we need not worry about that.
I'm not sure what you mean by "reducing" blogs to "merely" altering Google's results. Nobody is saying that blogs are reduced to anything. How is allowing blogs to determine Google rankings, which are arguably the most influential things on the Internet, reducing them in any way? I'd say its magnifying their power. It's not like their sole purpose will be to alter Google rankings. It's just a nice side effect that Google wants to make use of.
If you want blogs that have fewer links and more discussion, I'm sure you'll always be able to find them. Even the small number of links on a link-light personal blog are likely to be very high quality though, worth their weight in gold to Google.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
I'd have to point out a counterexample to Netscape: Internet Explorer.
Comes bundled with every version of Windows, and you don't have to download it.
What's this Submit thingy do?
A spell checker won't save people who confuse "there," "their
/. population.)
Don't forget "then" and "than". (Which seems to include about 50% of the
Same difference. You have so much overlap between the two that it doesn't really matter. Unless you're Anne Frank, you're not publishing a journal on the web without acknowledging other web sites. And no blogger does anything but relating links that he personally enjoyed.
Blogging isn't some selfless public service. It's just as narcissistic as any other personal site. Bloggers are promoting their own interests through the words of others. Maybe it's more interesting to read than someone just promoting themselves, but it's no less self-absorbed.
Wallowing in narcissism has nothing to do with weblogs, although the mass media have been propagating that slur since the earliest days.
Does having a popular weblog somehow give _you_ the right to define what weblogging is or should be, what is included and excluded? Or are you basing this on some survey of weblogs out there?
I certainly don't consider your non-personal blog any more authentic than things like this that were exploring personal topics eight years ago. Dave Winer has been posting psuedo-diary entries on Scripting News and DaveNet since the mid-1990s.
How dare you try to define weblogging for the rest of us.
links in blogs point to what bloggers are talking about, are interested in, and thus searching the web one gets what people who use the web are interested in.
The possible problem is: searching the web gets you what bloggers are interested in, and bloggers are not 100% representative of web users.
The issue here, as I see it, is that because of crosslinking, a lame blog entry about subject X could get a higher pagerank than a good forum thread about the same thing. Now, this is more of a problem with pagerank than a problem of blogging, but my point that more people getting into blogging could worsen google's results' quality still stands.
And just to be sure I'm clear on this: this is not the bloggers' problem, this is google's problem, and frankly link farming is a much worse "exploit" of this than the bloggers' artificially increased pagerank.