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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!"
I suppose google can afford to offer such serivices for free. Just look at google groups. But I won't be very surprised to see context specific ads on the blogs as well. The strategy google is following is targeted advertising. So if some blogger writes about say IBM Vs SCO, you can expect to see an ad of some Linux solution on top of that blog (Or worse, an MS ad saying you won't have any IP problems with MS). I think its a good idea because like search engine, you know who your target customer is for blogs. So there is indeed a business plan behind this.
What's under yellowstone?
It's only a matter of time before people start squatting on people's names for their "blog" space. As the post said, it'll be the .com frenzy all over again.
.com goldrush was remarkable. One of our sales guys asked for a list of all .com names (up to 6 characters long) that "haven't" been registered. It took one of my fellow developers (one with the patience, determination and ability to keep a straight face) to explain to him and the general manager that it would take at least a month of processing time to generate the list (by which time it would be useless).
I used to work for a well known Australian domain name registrar. Some of the stupidity of the
To know that you know what you know, and that you do not know what you do not know, that is true wisdom. --Scooby Doo
Random, haphazard thoughts on this...
...Slashdot... as prototypical examples), everyone could just be named a variant of joe13234, and it would make no functional difference. Some people (lawyers, politicians, analysts, etc.) are essentially paid for their comments, and a weblog can be seen as an extension of their work that provides a meaningful tieback to themselves.
It'd be really nice to have some kind of comparison list for various blog sites out there. I note from the blogger.com information, that they're still not making RSS part of the free service level, something which (ahem) LiveJournal offers on their free accounts.
I wonder if blogger.com has a client app... Semagic will autocreate your HTML and other handy stuff (including spellcheck) to make posting as easy as sending an instant message.
They also have friends lists, communities, and a bunch of stuff I haven't had time to check out.
Which brings up a core question... why have the blog format at all? In a lot of cases, it seems to just be a higher-tech version of rants written in a personal journal (as browsing some of them indicates), but I think eventually widespread adoption will happen simply because people will want some some way to tie their writing back to themselves. For most community sites/systems (Usenet, IRC,
On the dot-com thing... it seems like everything on the net, private IP or not, is being forced into a shareware model, in effect. Some fraction of the public using a system will toss a few bucks in the direction of the provider, and IMHO people will need to realize that they need to do this occasionally or we'll end up with extremely high-bandwidth connections to nothing. Even if you don't pay for everything, paying for something, even semi-randomly, helps keep the wheels of the net turning.
I now submit my comment to the traditional, ritual Slashdot assault.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
yeah great idea, offer it for free until users have bashed in a million words building up a nice resource that they have no control over then threaten to take it away a year or two later unless you pay the $39.99 that they have just had to introduce, you think we are stupid or what ?
hotmail had a similar plan except it took them 5years till everyone had a hotmail address then charge 50$ a year or put up with 2mb total inbox limit and 10filters so you can be spammed into submission
but then i would expect that from redmond, not google they are our friends right ? right ?
What happens to the members who just signed up? I would feel pretty bad if I payed my $35 to find out it's free 2 months later. Do they have any advantages over free users?
Karma: -2^0.5 . Mainly due to the imbibing of dihydrogen monoxide
One of the main reasons I use Blogger on my site is because it makes it easy to alert visitors to the latest things I've put up. Rather than hack away at HTML and PHP, which I do enough of already, I just pop open a BlogThis! and go. The automation and ease of use are what I really like (and it has sort of tempted me to blather on like an idiot about random crap, but what's a blog for if not that?).
Now they're removing the barriers between the paid service, which I did not subscribe to, and the free service. They say they're doing this because Google owns them, and there's no reason to have people pay them. Aside from the fact that that sounds completely nuts, I wonder what's going to change. Other folks here have mentioned text ads-- well, I don't want that. So far my site is ad-free, and I'd prefer to keep it that way.
Alternately, what if BlogThis! goes away-- or worse, requires you to view an ad before it'll open? This seems like the more likely scenario, because in this case the targeted audience isn't the people reading the blogs (think about it, how many hits does Aunt Mabel's Church Society blog really get?) but rather the people writing the blogs. Fill out a survey when you sign up and you too can blog for the low low cost of nothing plus time to read the same advertisement for scotch tape that you've read on every other site!
Of course, none of that is confirmed yet. But it'll happen, I bet.
(and no, this is not a thinly-veiled attempt to get people to visit my site)
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
After all, LiveJournal is completely Open Source. Subscription only gives you added features, but the free version does not even have ad banners. The site is completely funded by subscriptions and donations. A few other sites have spun off thanks to the freely available code, including DeadJournal.
I bet google has modified this software ( or is planning to in the future,) so that doesn't clobber there search results as much. Maybe they are building in tags and such so that there regular bots won't be as confused by all the links between blogs. Since this is a growing problem for them, it would make sense to try and preempt it.
maybe they just want the content...
bloggers create thousands of well written reviews of software/hardware/music/movies/porn, and google could index it, figure out what people like and sell that data to advertisers...... they bascially own the output of thousands of wanna be writers for a drop in the bucket.
sure, a normally company to offer these services would be a horrid business model, but already profitable google only needs a few more comodity servers and probably no more techies to maintain this... why not...
plus google text ads will probably be there.
personally i use marketbanker.com to sell and display text ads (which, incidently, google has removed from their search index... monopoly anyone? that was the first "evil corporate move" i have ever seen google make.)
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
What are the TOS for this? Do they own your comments/Blogs?
Whoever said a business must charge everyone for everything in order to make money? I can watch some free shows on antenna or download some Linux ISOs, but UPN and Redhat are still around
I would guess either Blogger Pro didn't have that many subscribers or they have plans to get free users pay for other things later. Maybe even sell books based on highest-moderated posts. Like every business decision its a gamble, but we don't have enough information to assume that Google is run by a bunch of idiots.
... the joke is getting old. The blogs I read are written by .) An important book publisher (O'reilly) .) cartoonists whose cartoons I read (Penny Arcade, Tom Tommorrow) .) Famous Political Comedian (Bill Maher) .) a Bagdad resident (or two) DURING the war...
I save that last one because that's the real deal... say it was teenage girls talking about makeup. That's real information for someone around the world wondering what is really going on. They could see how decadent and comfortable Wesertern miseries can be. Or we can see what's going on in Bagdad. The question of was it all made up came up, and it wasn't. It's proven a real person, and he is being honest within the range of his own biases, which again, is the point, these are people not journalists.
Yes, it's nice, it's vital to have journalists that try to be objective... but no one can really be objective, it's just as important to here all the biases in the world, not hidden beneath a veil of objectivity-seeming.
The blog is the web.
The original web pages were basically blogs. Not by date, but still, people had a little about them, their hobbies. Of course some of those hobbies were also full time jobs researching particle physics or medical science, but still, basically a personal page. It was a lot of IT workers, personal pages.
The blog makes that medium more chronological and therefore easier to produce changes for, in an era when a lot of different -types- of pages (web applications mind you) have been explored.
Anonymous because I'm so right I don't want to seem, you know, overly perfect or arrogant. Oh damn!
Blogs could be bad for the quality of google's results: because of blogs linking to eachother, the get a bigger pagerank than thy should, and therefore more influence on google than they deserve. I'm afraid that getting more of the unwashed massed to blog would be a bad thing. Ofcourse google could change the way pagerank works so that blogs have a reduced pagerank or something to that extend.
Salon article about blogs and their influence on google
Excerpt:
You'd be hard-pressed to design a system that gave the blogging community a greater impact on Google's results. Because bloggers by definition link far more than your average Web page, and because they also tend to link to each other's sites (most blogs feature a now standard list of comrades in their margins), a page that attracts the attention of a few bloggers will quickly shoot up the Google rankings. Do a search on Larry Lessig's book "The Future of Ideas" -- a hit with the blogging community -- and a review from a blog called Sopsy Digest shows up 15 notches higher than an article from Business Week. (Or at least it did the last time I checked; Google rankings are hardly set in stone.)
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?
If you use the Blogger tool to update a non-blogspot site-- such as, say, a personal site on a registered domain-- the text of the blog, formatted exactly as it appears on your page, is stored on your server. Within blogspot, I dunno, but if you decide that all the advertising you want to do for Blogger is a little icon on an otherwise ad-free page, then you still have a copy of all your data. I would assume that that includes the fact that you have all the rights to it, but IANAL and nor do I really care-- for the most part, there's usually nothing on a blog that's worth copyrighting anyway.
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
Me? I paid the $39.95 up-front and got Radio Userland. The content stays on my PC at home, and gets published to my own webspace.
Personally, I think that it should be the other way round, you pay so much a year, but only for the number of services you require. At the moment, part of the $39.95 I just paid covers the cost of hosting at Weblogs.com, as well as the space for comments on the weblog, and the trackback system. I don't need the first, and I'm not sure I really need the last one. Of course, it would be a pain to do pricing if you were to pick-n-choose...
MT.
-MT.
Don't forget about the recent link to Yahoo exploring blogs. Along with being a great source of information, blogs are methods to meet others of similar interests online. Quite a few people in this day and age have tried chatrooms, Match.com, Friendster, ... This is perhaps another avenue and adds one further layer of emersion.
a review from a blog called Sopsy Digest shows up 15 notches higher than an article from Business Week.
Maybe that's because the Sopsy's Digest review was better than the Business Week review.
I've heard this argument before, but IMHO it just boils down to journalists whining that "amateurs" are scoring higher on Google than they are.
But it is, in part, precisely this egalitarian, anyone-can-get-exposure nature of the Web that makes it so cool. If you don't like it, stick to the print media.
evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!
Couldn't they data-mine the blogs to get really accurate, really contemporary search results? They - for very little money - would have a legion of people out there categorizing the web for them. Who needs an easily-fooled bot when you can have a bunch of bloggers doing all the work?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Maybe this is google's response to Google bombing. Since weblogs seem to be the breeding ground for google bombs, maybe having more control over them might be the solution to cutting down instances.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
This is totally different from the old way of content filtering, where we pay companies (with money or with eyeballs on ads) to sort our content for us and present only the good stuff. There may be a bias against non-bloggers (I don't see why there should be, since blogs can link to other deserving sites as easily as to each other), but since anybody can be a blogger with minimal effort it shouldn't be a problem. The only real problem is that this system has the potential to take over certain functions now performed by newspapers, magazines, radio stations, music companies, and other "content filterers"; some people don't like that.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
I don't know about this particular review, but I generally find reviews done on technology by established media to be either a big ad or just an overview or comparison of features. While blogs link or contain such reviews, if you find a review on a blog or linked from a blog, you're also likely to find a review where the reviewer did some real in-depth testing. Also, blogs usually allow better feedback options, allowing users to add their real-world experience.
Ask yourself:
(1) How many reviews in the mainstream media give more information than you can find on the product manufacturers webpage? How many reviews on a blog give more information than you can find on the product manufacturers webpage?
(2) How does the feedback of a review in the online version of "more professional publication" compare to the feedback you'll see on a blog?
(3) How often do you see reviews, which give only the same information found on the webpage, linked from a blog, regardless of its origin?
When is slashdot going to let us link to images in our journals? I don't want to go over to blogspot or *shudder* livejournal, but every time I see one of those pages I feel a pang of jealousy.
At least add one or two more features! At least we could be allowed to choose what section (and thus color-scheme) our journal goes under?
The disappearance of journalist as career is an interesting thought -- firstly, isn't there a certain level of legitimacy in being a paid reporter? There are certain skills required to be a good reporter, and these skills are not available or even evident to some. Secondly, reporters aren't all commentators; news should be presented free of coloring opinion as much as possible, right? While I don't discount the concept of blogging-as-news, I do believe that more blogging is editorial in nature.
With sufficient tuning, I bet you could filter metadata from the bloggers, emotional content, and sort of, what, large group psycho-dynamics? Neat stuff.
It is very apparent in the west, that people are very logocentric, as long as it is has a label everything is ok, to the point that, labels are *all that matters* to some folk. A blackbox philosophy where all that matters, is that we know what to call things. People are like sheep.