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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!"
From the free features list:
;-P
Spellchecking: Fewer typos. Look smarter.
I say: Spellchecking is for wimps. Be smarter.
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?
Who needs a business plan? Just make sure that the numbered item before "profit" is "???".
We also get to listen to middle-aged women who do the blog thing bitch. Woo!
No. The reality is;
1. Profit
2. ???
3. Release formerly profitable software for free
less is more
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?
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...
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
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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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
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.
Cuz lst tym 1 luk'd @ rndm blogz 90% wuz thiz kinz f shizz.
Ugg, even more painful to write than read!
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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