Hosting Service Closes 3000 Blogs Without Notice

marmoset writes "Citing the high costs of running the free service, performance concerns, and health problems, Dave Winer closed down the weblogs.com hosting service without any prior notice. As many as 3000 sites are now inacessible, and the users who want to transfer their data elsewhere have to ask (politely) for it to be exported. As might be expected, reactions range from understanding to enraged. Netcraft has a report, too."

Comments

Not a Troll (for once...)

[imadork]

So, netcraft confirmed that *weblogs are dying?

Blogs

[Anonymous Coward]

I always thought blogs were blobs anyways.

Re:Blogs

[jxs2151]

I always thought blogs were blobs anyways.

Binary Large OBjects?

Re:Blogs

[Anonymous Coward]

or "Basicly Lots Of BullShit"

TOS

[BodyCount07]

The real question is whether or not this is allowed in the TOS. If it is, well than, that's how the cookie crumbles, users should have been making backups.

If it is not allowed by the TOS than users have a right to be outraged.

Re:TOS

[saihung]

Only in such a sick culture could the terms of a contract take precedence over common courtesy. It would've cost him so much to give people a couple of days to get their shit in order?

Re:TOS

[big tex]

If it is not allowed by the TOS than users have a right to be outraged.

No.

IANAL, but for any sort of agreement to be binding, there has to be some 'consideration'. What does the host get for hosting your blog? Nothing? Then the response - the only one that should be expected- is 'sucks to be you.'

Re:TOS

[EvanED]

"It would've cost him so much to give people a couple of days to get their shit in order?"

Actually, maybe. I don't know his hosting situation, but if even a quarter of the people had gone to back up their posts, that's a significant amount of extra traffic. Notice would have probably been have to be given out at least a week in advance to avoid a massive rush.

Re:TOS

[TeraCo]

Well, it's easy to talk about costs when they aren't YOUR costs to be paying, isn't it.

Re:TOS

[big tex]

Or, maybe we do it that way because common anything, be it courtesy or sense, isn't that common.
3000 users is a little big to know each by name and have a personal relationship. Hell, I'd bet that most of these people didn't even know who Mr. Winer was.

Re:TOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, I'd bet that most of these people didn't even know who Mr. Winer was.

If they did, they probably would have known better than to trust him.

Certainly no one in the Mac world is missing that self-absorbed drama queen. Good riddance. (No, you're right, Dave -- Apple doesn't need a new OS core and how dare Steve Jobs not run the company to your specifications?)

Re:TOS

[Aneurysm9]

Consideration does not have to be something received of value. It can be an agreement to do something that the contractor would not normally be bound to do. In this instance, the host agrees to provide hosting services and the user agrees to be bound by the TOS. Neither would normally be required to do either. That's mutuality of consideration and the contract shouldn't fail for lack of consideration.

Re:TOS

[Monty845]

In a case like this you could probably sight detrimental reliance... The contract if you could even call it that could be enforced based on the reasonable and detrimental belief that it existed... or atleast thats my undestanding.

Re:TOS

[JPriest]

Yes, but that cost would likely be offset when people read that only the free accounts were nuked. Non-free accounts were not nuked, so many of the free users probably would have been willing to pay to upgrade their service in order to keep it.

Re:TOS

[SanityInAnarchy]

I have a right to be however the fuck I feel like. I have a right to be outraged if I say I do. This is America.

Consider that certain open-source projects require you to license all your code to the project itself, in case it needs to change licenses, or in case it's selling a copy under a different license (reiserfs).

They are legally allowed to turn around and remove all credits to me and release all code under a proprietary license. But they don't. So users can't be outraged in a legal sense, but they sure can in an emotional one.

Re:TOS

[harlows_monkeys]

IANAL, but for any sort of agreement to be binding, there has to be some 'consideration'. What does the host get for hosting your blog? Nothing? Then the response - the only one that should be expected- is 'sucks to be you.'

A benefit to the offerer is only one form of consideration in contract law. Another form of consideration is a detriment to the offeree. Basically, if party A makes a promise to party B, and party B acts in reliance on that promise and will be harmed if A breaks the promise, that can serve as consideration.

There's also Promissory Estoppel, which could apply.

Re:TOS

[DNS-and-BIND]

Let me guess, you've never run a business before

Re:TOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps they could sue for civil damages then.

Of course, that assumes that their blog actually generates some kind of value. How much money are 0 Comments and 0 TrackBacks worth?

Re:TOS

[squidinkcalligraphy]

And it's even easier to talk about costs when you are part of the force that is increasing them as we speak: I refer to the slashdot effect.

Re:TOS

[Fnkmaster]

What you described *is* essentially promissory estoppel, or rather, promissory estoppel is when party B has relied on that promise to their detriment. The problem is here, what the hell is the monetary value of the detriment caused to these people? I guess their personal drivellings will be offline for a few weeks, but in the meantime, they are free to start blogging elsewhere, and after that, they can always import the archived stuff that Mr. Winer gives them back on July 1st. Basically they've lost access to some of their writings for two weeks - the work they are going to, they'd have to do any way since the free service on weblogger.com was coming to an end. I'm sure this is worth something to them, but good luck convincing anybody in a courtroom to care.

Morally, if the guy is really dealing with personal illness, I feel for him, I have dealt with illness in my family and myself and that sucks - but it doesn't excuse screwing over 3000 people. He should have just posted something saying "hey, the sites may not be working well over the next few days, we need bigger iron to host this stuff, if nobody comes forward in the next week to take over with hardware and labor, I'm going to have to flip the switch off". Or he shouldn't have agreed to host it himself in the first place if he didn't have the interest, hardware or cash to do so and cause people to miss the opportunity for a more orderly transition at an earlier point in time. So I concur with the general opinion that he's pulling a dick move. Clearly despite whatever he says, the site WAS working for most people most of the time prior to today - he could have just handed this stuff off to somebody else, I'm sure somebody would have volunteered to help transition to other hardware if anybody had known what was going on.

Re:TOS

[werfele]

Consideration does not have to be something received of value.

Actually, consideration does have to be something of value, although it could be an agreement or promise to perform some act. I can easily see how users receive consideration for their promise to abide by the TOS in the form of hosting services.

However, consideration must be mutual, and each additional user is a cost, not a benefit, for the hosting service. I don't see how the user's promise to abide by the TOS puts the hosting service in a better position than if no service were provided at all.

As others have mentioned, there's probably a better argument for reliance here, but action in reliation is actually an alternative to consideration, not a form of consideration.

Re:TOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Mailing list anyone?

Re:TOS

[prockcore]

Well, it's easy to talk about costs when they aren't YOUR costs to be paying, isn't it.

The company I work for used to be an ISP (as well as many other things). We decided the ISP (dialup and DSL) wasn't making money so we sold it.

But we had the common courtesy to set up forwards for all 30k of our subscriber's email, and keep their personal websites up and home directories for over a year.

Even to this day, we still host local non profits' websites for free (we don't accept new ones, but we'll continue to host the ones we did accept back in our ISP days)

Re:TOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, you have the right to feel and say 'mostly' what you want. You cant yell bomb in a crowded airport.

You dont have the right to be outraged because you say you do, you have the right to be outraged becuase of the first amendment.

Even hough you have freedom of speech, it doesnt mean you have freedom from criticism.

Re:TOS

[_KiTA_]

Obviously you're new to this whole intra-web thing.

People don't pay for stuff they get for free. If he had announced that he was closing free accounts, they would have slammed him HARD while they backed up their stuff, then ran off and found a new free host to mooch off of and left him high and dry with an outrageous bandiwdth bill.

You think he wasn't pushing them to try and get them to sign up for pay accounts already? The number one rule of the internet -- users are absolute resourch leeching mooches.

Re:TOS

[bobbagum]

How about traffic for ads, or subscriptions?

Re:TOS

[Anonymous Coward]

actually no, this is estonia dimwit. internet anyone?

Re:TOS

[jcr]

Well, they *do* have a *right* to be outraged, just like when a five year old is outraged over his parents' failure to buy him a pony. Outrage rational or not, is a right.

Likewise, it's my right to denounce anyone who bitches about Mr. Winer's decision to stop giving them a free ride as a self-centered, worthless, little freeloading git.

-jcr

Re:TOS

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to run a business but it began to eat into my "judge people on Slashdot" time.

Re:TOS

[fwarren]

No, he has a right to be outraged, because it is a God given right. I.E. indemic of humanity.

Governments merly have the opprotunity to recognize or ignore these "truths"

I.E. "we believe these truths to be self evident"

--------

Re:TOS

[TeraCo]

The company I work for

So, it wasn't your money there either..

Re:TOS

[spacecowboy420]

users should have been making backups.

'nuff said, if they haven't, well they should never make that mistake again.

If the site is that important -
A: It shouldn't be on a free host. Pay for your hosting, you have more leverage in case of downtime - simple as that.
B: The site should have a sys admin with his ass on the line - One that makes backups.

Otherwise, the leeches should take some personal responsibility and quit bitchin' - it was free. If it was up a day, they got more than their money's worth, if not for this free service, they wouldn't have learned the invaluable first basic lesson of being a site operator/maintainer - make backups.

Re:TOS

[Ulven]

No, but it was someones money.

Re:TOS

[Aneurysm9]

Actually, consideration does have to be something of value, although it could be an agreement or promise to perform some act. I can easily see how users receive consideration for their promise to abide by the TOS in the form of hosting services.

However, consideration must be mutual

I guess I was thinking of something as a tangible benefit when I said something received of value as opposed to the intangible that is a promise. As for mutuality of consideration, that is merely a requirement that both parties provide consideration, not that the consideration provided is fair to both parties. The hosting service receives a potential benefit by increasing the number of users of the service. It is up to them to transform that into an actual benefit, but that does not affect the validity of the consideration provided to them.

Further, the hosting service receives the benefit of being able to rely on the TOS should a user violate the terms and they wish to terminate that user's access. Without the TOS the user could make some sort of frivolous claim that the service was providing the service indefinitely because no terms were established. In that case it is clearly a benefit to have had the user's agreement to the TOS a priori.

Remember, consideration need not be realized. It may be simply the potential to realize a benefit. Think of options contracts.

Re:TOS

[sql*kitten]

If he had announced that he was closing free accounts, they would have slammed him HARD while they backed up their stuff, then ran off

It depends on how much effort was involved, not just to export the data and import it somewhere (performing whatever conversion is required) but to communicate the new URL to everyone.

A modest fee would most likely have been paid, especially if new functionality came with pay accounts. Look at Livejournal - you can sign up for free, but paying users get more features. In fact Slashdot could learn a lot from Livejournal.

Re:TOS

[Anonymous Coward]

TardsTakeNote: You get what you pay for.

Re:TOS

[hachete]

consideration - but also goodwill. Business runs a lot on goodwill - i.e. can I pay this bill later? sure, we know and trust you - that sort of thing. In this case, Dave had 2 choices: give a warning or nuk'em. With a warning, he may have gained customers. He would still have lost some good will but by going nuclear, and with some shabby *audio* instructions, he's lost a whole lot more goodwill, gained lots of hostile reviews etc. This isn't good business - but isn't this joker some kind of half-arsed academic these days?

Re:TOS

[Moraelin]

I don't know about not paying... I would definitely pay to keep the blogging fucktards off the net, if it was even possible. Or at least off Google's searches.

Let's face it, searches for some subjects have become a completely useless exercise. Anything which happens to be the current fashionable topic for these fucktards to whine about, is being drowned in dozens of groups of 1000 blogs linking to each other. The actual information is _polluted_ by tons of _garbage_ spewed by fucktards who actually work hard to that end.

Their whiny shit showing on top on Google is like being elected mayor of Loserville. The apex and chief achievement of their pathetic lives.

Yes, you can use minus keywords or other such tricks in Google, but by the time you worked out the combination which actually gives you any actual information, you could have gone and bought a book on the subject.

It's sad. What was once a valuable medium for finding information, has been polluted by a retarded vanity contest among fucktards.

And, just to be fair, the same goes for the gazillions of retarded CS clan pages and such.

Re:TOS

[stephenbooth]

I think the point was that common courtesy exists and it's usually a good idea to follow it. Prockcore didn't say that it was they who were behind the polite and courteous behavior, rather that it was the company who, presumably, were the ones paying.

Stephen

Re:TOS

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to run a business but it began to eat into my "judge people on Slashdot" time.
ROFL. No mod points, but have a pat on the back.

Re:TOS

[Lord_Dweomer]

"And it's even easier to talk about costs when you are part of the force that is increasing them as we speak: I refer to the slashdot effect."

I don't RTFA you insensitive clod!

Re:TOS

[tf23]

Morally, if the guy is really dealing with personal illness, I feel for him, I have dealt with illness in my family and myself and that sucks - but it doesn't excuse screwing over 3000 people.


That's bullshit. If the guy's sick, the guy's sick. Simple as that. What he provided for people was/is for _free_. If they didn't have enough common sense to backup their own data and keep copies of stories they posted, it's their own fault.

But railing on the guy because he's sick and can't provide the quality free service that he did for a time (years? I don't know) seems extremely rude.

It's not like you've got the majority of these 3k people volunteering to come to his house and help him out for a few months to hopefully get over this crisis, no?

I'll agree with you that it could have been handled differently. Very differently infact - could have been better, could be worse (I imagine him pulling the powercord on the box and mumbling like cartman "screw you all") heh

Re:TOS

[transops.net]

Let me begin by saying I understand the emotion behind your comment. This is a really sad turn of events for anyone who hosted an active blog on Dave's network. That said, let's look at this from a capitalist (take the emotion out of that word, just focus on its abstract definition) perspective.

Dave Winer has provided a portion of his network resources to the Internet community at large for several years, manifested by our (now terminated) ability to host a blog for free on his systems. Note that I'm not attempting to portray Dave as an altruistic fellow, although I do in fact think he's a great guy. We can't escape the fact that he achieved a significant amount of promotion for Manilla in trade for our no-cost use of his system. I guarantee you that over the term of the arrangement, he gained far more from the deal in mindshare than he spent in bandwidth.

Unfortunately, nothing in this world is static. People are still getting older, stocks go up and down, and Dave's life (both personal and business, however little separation there may be between the two) isn't exempt from this rule. Before we rush to cry foul at his decision, let's look at some background information:

(1) Dave Winer is widely recognized as an Internet communication pioneer, having been an early designer of a useful system for letting people people manage online content. Depending on your current needs and budget, there may be better products out there, but his company's work remains relevant.

(2) The whole Manilla concept borrowed from earlier ideas, and became a model that others would follow in turn when they developed other CMS environments. This indicates a protracted period of skilled effort on Dave's part. Which leads us to the conclusion that...

(3) Dave Winer is most likely an intelligent man who shows every sign of continuing to live in a fair manner. His recent statements on the issue at hand seem well thought out and polite, which leads me to believe the health problems he references aren't related to mental disease. If his mind is still intact, he probably had very good reasons for forgoing public notification. We should remind ourselves that...

(4) Although the TOS for this hosting most likely hold the responsible parties harmless in the event of service discontinuance, there is always the possibility of some squirrely blogger getting notions of litigation in a moment of emotional weakness. Unspecified damages for emotional pain and suffering due to inability to dredge up the past by perusing their blog, or some other such title. It's unlikely. but possible for America's rather litigious populace. Remember the Fast Food Makes Us Obese lawsuits.

Remember, attorneys always give the same opening advice to their clients: Never admit culpability, and try not to say anything at all without first passing it through Big_Law_Firm.pl for content filtering. Even then, it's usually best to use Pricey_PR_Group.php to speak publically about your actions. Reference the Santa Cruz Operation for mastery of this art.

To sum it all up, let the inner Libertarian (no emotion, just the concept) in you shine by Making Daily Backups of anything important. A few lines of bash or perl scripting with a dash of UNIX utils can prevent years of therapy and rehab. As an added bonus, you get the ability to feel good about yourself by contributing your techniques to the community while you deposit checks from your clients who just *love* your new online backup service.

Thus, personal responsibility helps us keep smart people out of the field of dentisty by preventing excessive gnashing of teeth. Less demand in that field equals more folks to give us free hosting services, right? More personally, since everyone wants to feel special in their own way, I feel special knowing my dentist doesn't feel inspired to name his next luxury car after me. It ain't much, but anything that helps me sleep better is well worth the effort.

Re:TOS

[TeraCo]

And my point was, it's easy to talk about courtesy when you are throwing around other people's money.

Re:TOS

[gl4ss]

well, the guy certainly has no problems linking to an AUDIO POST hosted on HARVARDS EXPENSE.

he just created something he doesn't want to a) take care of b) give to somebody else.

-

Re:TOS

[Anonymous Coward]

You must really suck at using Google. I've never ended up on a blog while looking for something else...

Re:TOS

[stephenbooth]

Which brings us back to the point that in that case the people throwing the money around were, presumably, those people who's money it was.

Stephen

Re:TOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Try using Google to find some new names to call people... You used "fucktards" waaay too many times in one post. I really enjoy using that word, so can we not beat it to death so quickly? Thank you.

Re:TOS

[Havokmon]

It depends on how much effort was involved, not just to export the data and import it somewhere (performing whatever conversion is required) but to communicate the new URL to everyone.

A modest fee would most likely have been paid, especially if new functionality came with pay accounts. Look at Livejournal - you can sign up for free, but paying users get more features. In fact Slashdot could learn a lot from Livejournal.

I run a free/paid email service - vfemail.net. You're welcome to monitor the main page and watch the number of free subscribers vs paid subscribers, but the paid users are pretty steady at 28 - while the number of free signups has just crossed the 10,000 mark :/.

People are cheap. If it wasn't for Google ads, I'd be dead in the water.

Re:TOS

[sql*kitten]

People are cheap.

But what do paid users get that free users don't? What is it that drives a free user to upgrade? That's what needs to be studied to improve your conversion rate.

Some of Livejournal's stuff is seemingly trivial - for example, paid users can upload a bigger selection of icons to attach to each post. But, it turns out that a lot of Livejournal users are willing to pay in order to have the "perfect" icon on hand for whatever they're posting about. This doesn't even increase the bandwidth bill, since an icon would be attached anyway, and it only modestly increases the storage bill (they're only 100x100 JPEGs). Things like this mean they don't have to bother with banner ads at all.

Re:TOS

[Kombat]

Governments merly have the opprotunity to recognize or ignore these "truths"


What the heck are you talking about? The courts have the "opportunity" to rule on the scope and interpretation of the "truths" contained in laws handed down by the government. The government doesn't "recognize" any truths, it merely codifies rights into law.

I.E. "we believe these truths to be self evident"

Are you off your rocker? First of all, the actual quote is, "we hold these truths to be self-evident," not "believe." And that quote is from Dr. Martin Luther King, not the "government."

Re:TOS

[slimak]

and likely a tax write-off for the company so while it was a nice thing to do you have to wonder if the same action would have been taken if the costs came directly out of the presidents/ceo/board's after-tax dollars.

Re:TOS

[Anonymous Coward]

Likewise, it's my right to denounce anyone who bitches about Mr. Winer's decision to stop giving them a free ride as a self-centered, worthless, little freeloading git.

You'll have too look pretty hard. I have yet to see a single comment bitching about his decision to stop giving people a free ride. I've seen lots of bitching about his doing it without warning. Sounds pretty mean to me, but I don't know many details.

Re:TOS

[joshmccormack]

I run a free/paid email service - vfemail.net. You're welcome to monitor the main page and watch the number of free subscribers vs paid subscribers, but the paid users are pretty steady at 28 - while the number of free signups has just crossed the 10,000 mark :/.

People are cheap. If it wasn't for Google ads, I'd be dead in the water.

Great business lesson here - don't expect people to pay:

• Unless they have to
• There are no other options

And make your money off of their greed - sell ads. Their laziness - sell extra space or options like backups, saving sent messages, etc.

Re:TOS

[WoodstockJeff]

In the purchase of a business, "goodwill" is valued at about USD 1.00. This is because that goodwill is transient... it does not transfer to the new entity, simply because it isn't the old company, even if it has the same name. Loyalty to, say, Chrysler products does not guarantee loyalty to Daimler-Chrysler products, unless D-C maintains the same level of support and quality that the Chrysler loyalist expects.

If you doubt this, please note how much the "goodwill" of Caldera is worth today.

Re:TOS

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually agree with a great deal of what you said, maybe google needs to subtract points for "blog".

Re:TOS

[dasmegabyte]

So stop offering to them for free. I don't advertise at all and still have more than 28 people using my $5 per month email hosting deal. I've also discovered that people who pay a fair price for things are less likely to make fantastic demands than people who don't pay anything. Funny how that is.

Incidentally, there are plenty of things I do offer for free (my photos are in the public domain, for example, and I donate bandwidth to several projects). But since maintenance of my webserver depends on bandwidth being paid for, I don't screw around with free-hosting-for-everybody. All you're going to attract is dumb leeches who only know, only CARE, that they aren't going to pay a lot for that muffler.

Re:TOS

[mcmonkey]

"This isn't good business"

Exactly. This wasn't a business.

"With a warning, he may have gained customers."

What customers? There was no business; there was no payment or consideration from the users. There were no customers. And if the issue is the burden of supporting a large user base, why would he want more?

"he's lost a whole lot more goodwill"

Screw goodwill. Where's the goodwill for all the service he's been providing at no cost to thousands of people? There should be an outpouring of thanks for what he provided while he could provide it. Instead, there's a bunch of ungrateful leeches.

Re:TOS

[werfele]

I have to concede that having an additional user is presumably some sort of potential benefit to the hosting service, or the service provider wouldn't be seeking new users (and at one point this provider was signing up new users). However, to argue that a contract was formed, I believe you'd have to articulate what that benefit was.

I'm still not quite with you on the terms of service. The proper comparison isn't a user with the TOS agreement against a user without (where the former is admittedly preferable for the service provider). To determine whether the service provider is receiving a benefit from a new user, we would have to compare a user with TOS agreement against no user at all. A user who agrees to the TOS restricting his use of the services hasn't really given up anything, because he'd have no access at all to the service absent the agreement.

Re:TOS

[dasmegabyte]

Bully for you. In the early days of my hosting service, I had a machine crash on me at a very crummy co-loc house. They said they'd send the broken, possibly unrecoverable hard drive to me, but only if I paid $250 for them to pull it out and put it in a cardboard box (plus shipping). This was after they told me that they never set up the incremental CD backups I'd been paying them $10 a month to perform.

Since I was making less than $20 profit at that point, I was looking at paying $230 out of pocket to MAYBE get a backup that I said I didn't provide for a handful of users (only two of whom hadn't properly backed up when it died). Since I also had to spend money to get a new server up as soon as possible as well as install it temporarily in a very expensive local co-loc, I didn't do it.

It would have been nice to have performed this courtesy. But we couldn't -- not without taking out a big loan for no payback. In the end, it didn't hurt us -- the guys whose data we couldn't save are still with the service and we're bigger than ever in a nice, cheap, honest local co-loc.

Re:TOS

[13thirteen]

You'd have to figure out what's considered a blog, then - for instance, /. and Drudge Report are considered blogs, but I think both these sites would argue that they are 'news sites'.

Re:TOS

[geoffspear]

Umm, Thomas Jefferson != Martin Luther King.

Re:TOS

[hesiod]

> Try using Google to find some new names to call people

how do you google for a word you do not know exists?

Fucktard...

Re:TOS

[Anonymous Coward]

"...paid users are pretty steady at 28 - while the number of free signups has just crossed the 10,000 mark :/.
People are cheap. If it wasn't for Google ads, I'd be dead in the water."

You touch the most important point for me to not pay, how do I know that you'll be running the service next month?
Why pay for a nice account when I could be greeted by a "No money/I'm fed up, f'ck off" anytime.

(Not meaning you specifically, don't be sad :))

Re:TOS

[operagost]

I guess they got away with that breach of contract (failing to perform your backups). It's too bad you couldn't find someone to sue their butts pro bono.

They should have at least refunded all your costs, if they had any morals.

Re:TOS

[sugarmotor]

Your saying Adwords actually produces income for you? Would you be able to say how much? Stephan

Re:TOS

[autopr0n]

A modest fee would most likely have been paid, especially if new functionality came with pay accounts. Look at Livejournal - you can sign up for free, but paying users get more features. In fact Slashdot could learn a lot from Livejournal.

Slashdot has a paid subscription service. Mostly it's just a way to sell extra impressions that they don't have advertisers for. They let you 'buy' the ads that you'd see and replace them with nothing. They don't explain it that way, of course. They also give you access to features that you should probably get anyway, like seeing all of your comments rather then just the last 50.

Re:TOS

[dasmegabyte]

Well, when it comes down to brass tacks, we _DID_ still owe them close to $800 for the obscene bandwidth used by Something Positive. So I figured, fair's fair.

Re:TOS

[Cromac]

> Try using Google to find some new names to call people

how do you google for a word you do not know exists?

Do you really not know how to look up new information? Ever heard of a Thesaurus?

Re:TOS

[hesiod]

> > Try using Google to find some new names to call people
> Do you really not know how to look up new information?

Do you really think a thesaurus would help for for name-calling? Somehow, I doubt "asshole" will be found in Roget's. (BTW, I did look, and asshole isn't in dictionary.com's thesaurus)

Re:TOS

[TeraCo]

Hmm... I don't know about that, especially if you are a company, you are more than likely throwing around 'creditors' money. Which is much different to money which comes out of your own pocket, and stops you buying that new iPod or alternatively.. food.

Re:TOS

[stephenbooth]

Even if the money is creditors money at a given time, most companies (those that want to stay in business) make a point of repaying their creditors before buying iPODs. I realize that your goals/ethics may be different. Whilst companies such as Enron make the news they are, fortunately, a small minority.

Stephen

Re:TOS

[TeraCo]

I hope you're deliberately misinterpretting my words, rather than just stupid.. so I'll point it out again..

Company money is DIFFERENT to personal money. THe company money, generally owed to people, share holders, creditors, etc.. is easier to spend 'morally' than personal money, which you need to live, for instance.

Re:TOS

[meepzorb]

The number one rule of the internet -- users are absolute resourch leeching mooches.

The number two rule of the internet... people with user-hostile attitudes like this wonder why they go bankrupt when they try to make money on the internet.

Re:TOS

[hesiod]

Moderators: read the contents of the thread before acting like a tool. The "fucktard" comment is a joke, referring to the previous post. And the question itself is legitimate.

Re:TOS

[hachete]

The man runs(?) a business that charges for hosting weblogs. On that evidence, I'd say it was a business. Userland certainly wasn't - and isn't - a charity but DW, in order to proselytise weblogs one presumes, offered, through Userland, to host weblogs at zero charge.

Further, I'd argue that Userland produces software and hasn't the depth of expertise or pocket to extend it's core competence into other areas, unlike others I could mention. In a business sense, the whole Userland thing is beginning to smell a bit. I do hope they have an exit plan because on current showing, it's a bit of a Heath-Robinson operation.

h

Re:TOS

[mnemex]

And yet, Livejournal has plenty of paying users.

How can this be?

Re:TOS

[Havokmon]

About $90/month with aprox 4000 impressions per day and AT MOST 20 actual clicks. The big money comes from 1 click now and then.

Re:TOS

[Havokmon]

But what do paid users get that free users don't?

More bandwidth. More storage. More Spam options. Err anti-Spam options ;)

What is it that drives a free user to upgrade? That's what needs to be studied to improve your conversion rate.

I think free users will always be free users. It's the users looking for a specific service are the ones that upgrade. The free accounts are just what I have to put up with to get those paying users.

Re:TOS

[Havokmon]

Why pay for a nice account when I could be greeted by a "No money/I'm fed up, f'ck off" anytime.

I never understood that. You can have that problem with a publicly held company. Why does the 'personal touch' invite doubts as to whether the service will survive?

But all I pay is bandwidth, and that's covered no problem. If anything, I'll just refuse Outlook access :P (Just Kidding!)

Re:TOS

[sugarmotor]

That sounds pretty good. I'm guessing all ads are about viruses and email. See you Stephan

Re:TOS

[Havokmon]

That sounds pretty good. I'm guessing all ads are about viruses and email.

Mostly. A good chunk are for competitors. At first it kinda bothered me, then I figured if they left via an ad, they probably weren't going to pay anyways, and at least I'd get a few cent out of them ;)

Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you trust any hosting company to keep the only copy of your data, if it were all that important to you?

Re:Backups

[SanityInAnarchy]

In this case, suppose I don't actually own my own computer?

In general, suppose I'm renting storage space? Suppose I've got terabytes of data that I won't need for very long, but I need somewhere to store it NOW? Obviously I can't afford backups, and I have to trust someone else with my data.

Re:Backups

[stilwebm]

The users have varying level of backups, but the biggest issue is that no one can find the new blog now. The weblogs.com domain was integral to these blogs, much like blogger.com, typepad.com, etc. The weblogs were found at hostnames like booknotes.hammock.com, rex.weblogs.com, delphi.weblogs.com, etc. Users very much could have used an opportunity to say what their new URL was. Dave Winer decided that was too much work [MP3 audio post he made].

Re:Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry that should be booknotes.weblogs.com but I pasted from the wrong place.

Re:Backups

[ameoba]

From the sound of things, I doubt that the guy who was hosting everything would have much of a problem handing over the domain to somebody who'd be willing to put the server back up or at least provide redirection to the new homes of the sites.

Re:Backups

[el-spectre]

Well, in that case you shoulda kept it on floppies or something.

Losing stuff w/o backups sucks. We've all been there. Still, if you know better and don't do it, you're not gonna get much love from slashdot.

Re:Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

Suppose I've got terabytes of data that I won't need for very long, but I need somewhere to store it NOW?

And you're doing that on a free blogging service?

Re:Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

Insightful? C'mon mods. Troll.

Re:Backups

[ziggy_zero]

The real question is, where are bloggers going to go to whine about this????

Re:Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

You've never had to deal with Dave Winer, have you? To clue you in: Googling "Dave Winer" asshole brings back over eight hundred distinct hits. Reasonable behaviour is not on the cards.

Re:Backups

[jjsoh]

• "In general, suppose I'm renting storage space?"

In general, that might be fine if you are renting. But in this case, only free accounts were closed. Of course, this page states that you can still retrieve your data upon request:

• 3. If you want a copy of your weblogs.com-hosted website, post a comment here, include the URL of the site. Sometime after July 1, 2004, I will export all the requested sites, without their membership groups. You can then download them and do with them as you wish. I won't export them before July 1, and this is a one-time offer.

If you had paid for their services, you'd still have access to that data without jumping through a bunch of hoops.

Besides, if you're relying on storing any amount of data (terabytes or not) for temporary backup on a FREE blogging service, then you get exactly what you pay for; especially when the service is designed to host journal entries, not terabytes of data.

Re:Backups

[Anthony Boyd]

The weblogs were found at hostnames like booknotes.hammock.com, rex.weblogs.com, delphi.weblogs.com, etc.

Hmm. Let's try your comment again, with a little help from the Wayback Machine:

The weblogs were found at hostnames like booknotes.hammock.com, rex.weblogs.com, delphi.weblogs.com, etc.

Whew! So you're right, redirects to new hosts would have been nice. But isn't it good to see that all is not lost?

Re:Backups

[mopslik]

Suppose I've got terabytes of data...

Well, in that case you shoulda kept it on floppies or something.

Please insert disk 457,982,221,010 of 695,763,100,218 to continue...

Re:Backups

[l810c]

The real question is, where are bloggers going to go to whine about this????

Slashdot?

The site does seem kinda slow from the Whiney Blogger effect.

Re:Backups

[fiaworldrally]

well sure backing up is an excellent idea but some of these people arent like us, meaning that it isnt their life so they would expect some sort of warning or statement of service termination or the like before they freak out and save everything...so their actions have some merit.

Re:Backups

[mrscorpio]

Oh no! THAT one is corrupted! Shit!

Re:Backups

[sql*kitten]

In general, suppose I'm renting storage space?

Emphasis mine. In that case, you're entitled to whatever your contract with the storage provider entitles you to. Not the same thing at all as a free service.

Anyway, your example doesn't work, because how would you get terabytes of data from A to B over a cheap connection? Answer, you wouldn't, you'd put it on tape and ship the crate of tapes to the storage facility.

Re:Backups

[jesterzog]

Why would you trust any hosting company to keep the only copy of your data, if it were all that important to you?

I agree. I'm currently working on a website interfaced system that will store and organise data for a niche collection amateur astronomers, who often keep observing logs of what they're looking at. I'm not going to go out of my way to try and lose their data or step on it if and when they choose to enter it, but I also don't expect people to trust me with it. The data they store is likely to be quite valuable and important to them, even if not many other people, and simply trusting an anonoymous person to look after it isn't something that a lot of people will do easily.

For this reason, I'm quite keen to build in a feature that will let people export their data so they can download it and store it how they like. I think it's only when people are give the option to control their own copy that they'll risk entering something like this into another system... at which point it can be combined with other people's data to give everyone more interesting views of things that everyone else is doing.

Re:Backups

[adamofgreyskull]

There comes a time in any thread when you've abstracted too far. The sum-total of these "people"'s storage needs would probably only fill a few floppies when zipped.

Re:Backups

[zoobot]

I run a web hosting company, and we state explicity in our TOS/Legal that "No guarantees are made of any kind, either expressed or implied, as to the integrity of these backups." I don't think there are too many companies out there that will guarantee data under all circumstances. The legal implications are too great. Heck, even I keep alternate backups of my own data!

Re:Backups

[Paleomacus]

I was going to say Real Life but that's too unrealistic.

Re:Backups

[amaiman]

General Failure Reading Drive A:
Abort, Retry, Fail?

Re:Backups

[klaricmn]

In general, suppose I'm renting storage space? Suppose I've got terabytes of data that I won't need for very long, but I need somewhere to store it NOW? Obviously I can't afford backups, and I have to trust someone else with my data.

The keyword in the above is 'renting'. If you are paying for space somewhere then you should have a reasonable expectation that it will be backed up. If a given provider doesn't, then i'd move right along to the next in line.

That said, it's likely that many consumer-level providers simply store their backups on another machine in the data center. (Sure some of the largers ones have better practices, but ignore that for a second.) Most of these providers also recommend that you keep backups of your own as well. If it's critical data you should have no problems finding time/space to back it up.....otherwise you pay for what you get.

Re:Backups

[Lordrashmi]

You underestimate the amount of worthless drivel some people spout in blogs. I doubt it goes to the Terabytes, but the size is large I am sure.

Re:Backups

[silicon not in the v]

What did you transfer those terabytes of data from then? Your PDA?

Re:Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone mod parent up, this is very true.

Re:Backups

[Gilmoure]

GMail!

Re:Backups

[WuphonsReach]

In general, suppose I'm renting storage space? Suppose I've got terabytes of data that I won't need for very long, but I need somewhere to store it NOW? Obviously I can't afford backups, and I have to trust someone else with my data.

Um, use a few different free e-mail services and e-mail your stuff there? In fact, some blog packages will even e-mail every post to an address for you automatically. Sure, it's not trivial to restore a blog from all of those individual e-mails, but it is doable. I've debated signing up for GMail solely to e-mail gpg-encrypted backup files to it.

Terabytes? You're own your own... maybe carry around a few 400GB SATA drives?

Re:Backups

[el-spectre]

Well, DUH... use the 10 inch floppies... they hold more...

Re:Backups

[elemental23]

That may be useful for someone who wants to look up old content on one of the weblogs in question (provided they know about the Wayback Machine), but it doesn't help the web site authors let people know what their new URLs are. A simple redirection would completely eliminate this problem, as would have a little advance warning so the authors could post their new URLs before the change.

Re:Backups

[Grrr]

Hear hear.
Talk about spinning out wild hypothetical situations (and modded +3, Insightful?)...

What the OP said was Why would you trust any hosting company to keep the only copy of your data, if it were all that important to you? And that's all they said.

No vendor should be trusted with the lone copy of irreplacable data. Period.
Especially if you're renting storage space!

Terabytes of data residing anywhere, without a backup strategy in place beforehand, is "dispensable" almost by definition.
Backup and recovery of data is not something to be done as an afterthought.
If you can't afford to back it up (somehow), you have no business being responsible for it at all.

<grrr>

Re:Backups

[WuphonsReach]

For this reason, I'm quite keen to build in a feature that will let people export their data so they can download it and store it how they like. I think it's only when people are give the option to control their own copy that they'll risk entering something like this into another system... at which point it can be combined with other people's data to give everyone more interesting views of things that everyone else is doing.

One of the things that I like about Blogger.com is that they let me publish to a FTP server that I control. Which is useful, because it lets me backup the content. Even if Blogger.com would go under, while I wouldn't be able to create any new content to that tree, I can still maintain my old content by hand.

Another alternative for you would be to setup either read-only rsync or read-only FTP service for each user. Provide the users with the account information and settings and leave it up to them. Of course, that only works if your system generates static HTML files.

Backups?

[Insomnia]

You mean all those who have these all-important weblogs don't have any backups of that data anywhere else?

Re:Backups?

[Cyb3rBull3ts]

maybe they should search the google cache?

Re:Backups?

[Insomnia]

Figures. Two of us post with the same point at the same time (10:37 PM). A.C. gets score 5: Insightful, and I get score 0, Redundant. Guess I shouldn't have taken that extra minute to spellcheck it, eh?

Re:Backups?

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that your a whinging karma obsessed retard may have something to do with it.

Re:Backups?

[Insomnia]

Haha. I intended this as a joke. I really could care less what my karma is on this site. I just found it rather funny. I see you don't agree (either that, or I'm missing the humor in your reply as well).

Man, I haven't been called a "retard" since... third grade I think. Thanks, that really makes me feel like a kid again. ;)

Newsflash...

[WIAKywbfatw]

When your data is on someone else's servers, and you don't have any of that data properly backed up, then you are completely at their mercy when it comes to being able to use it or losing it entirely. This is especially true when the service that they are supplying is being provided for free.

Re:Newsflash...

[pongo000]

Now imagine this was SourceForge...

Re:Newsflash...

[oliverthered]

I've got many a dead page from google cache it works wonders, well unless it's hosting service goes down again.

Re:Newsflash...

[FrYGuY101]

As a MINOR participant in one SF project, I'll gladly point out that I keep a local copy of the source. If SF went tits-up (God forbid), I'd be quite saddened, but I wouldn't blame SF if I also lost my copy of the source. It'd be MY damn fault for not taking precautions.

Re:Newsflash...

[geoffspear]

Especially since Sourceforge points out to anyone starting a new project, very clearly, that they are responsible for backing up all of their project's data.

Re:Newsflash...

[Ztras]

[People whining because their free beer was turned off] > Now imagine this was SourceForge... And that is what mirrors are for... http://mirror.optusnet.com.au/ http://ftp.heanet.ie/ etc, as Google will tell you. Plus, hopefully a good project manager does not trust a free service for a non-trivial project. Code backups anyone?

Re:Newsflash...

[SillyNickName4me]

> Especially since Sourceforge points out to anyone starting a new project, very clearly, that they are responsible for backing up all of their project's data.

Which is obviously good advise. You should do so with your data at home (who does that..) but even more so with data you host somewhere else.

When the hosting is free as well as seemed to be the case here, thats yet more reason to keep your own backups..

Re:Newsflash...

[Anonymous Coward]

I know free web services, like web mail encourage you to use their address books and keep all your contacts in their system. They sell you on the idea of just leave it to us, you can access this data from anywhere cause it's on the web, and plus it's free. Then they pull the rug out from you with no notice? That's pretty rude.

How many people do you know, who use a free web based service, like email or blog, that makes copies/backup the online data. I guess the lesson here is don't trust a corporation. Free for life <small print>(of our nearly bankrupt company)</small print>

Re:Newsflash...

[pipingguy]

When your data is on someone else's servers, and you don't have any of that data properly backed up, then you are completely at their mercy when it comes to being able to use it or losing it entirely. This is especially true when the service that they are supplying is being provided for free.

What part of the above is so difficult to comprehend? Surely someone that has important writings or content also has it on their local hard drive, no? If it's been crawled, Google cache or the Wayback Machine might be able to recover some, but there's no sympathy for not backing-up stuff that's important. Then again, how many blogs are actually "important"?

Re:Newsflash...

[Huogo]

I pay for hosting, and I still do backups at least once/week (mainly for the database backups). Anyone who keeps anything on the 'net should know that its an unstable place, and thing can dissapear at a moment's notice. I don't trust anything to be kept securely to the web, and no one else should either.

Re:Newsflash...

[LostCluster]

Anything on a web server is most likely on a hard disk... And hard disks are considered stable because their data doesn't disappear when the computer is powered down or reboots, but they don't last forever. All HDs have moving parts, and eventually some part of that drive will fail physically making your data nearly inaccessable. It's not a question of if but when. It will happen. Expect it to happen about 4-5 years after the drive first put into service. You should see this coming, not be caught unexpectedly by it.

Re:Newsflash...

[mabinogi]

that's not what he was refering to...he was refering to the tendacy for the hard drive containing your data to find itself being auctioned off after the company that used to own it went under....expect it to happen about 6 months to a year after the company is formed.

Re:Newsflash...

[Mad Marlin]

Well, I got all the way to here in the article before I actually broke down and put in a dvd+rw to do a backup of my computer. It's been a few weeks.

Re:Newsflash...

[rjamestaylor]

When ePhysician.com turned out it's corporate lights it kept the servers running (a testament to the developers there -- the system ran over 6 months without any maintenance and the only way people found out the company was liqudated was when they attempted to add new users, delete existing users or update pharmacy fax numbers and no one ever returned a phone call). One day my company received a call from a prestigious ePhysician customer (the head of psychiatry at an Ivy League School) based on our company's website being linked as a eP partner; the call was directed to me as I was the CTO of our company (CTO and the "reboot monkey"; it was a small company and I really was the lead web app developer but someone needed to fill the C' role). The caller was trying to reach eP and I told him they were out of business and all their assets were on the table for a fraction of their cost. He was shocked and explained that he needed his records for legal reasons (prescription data is critical to prescribers). I told him to quickly and carefully use the standard report tools to pull the data down for archiving.

I develop ASP-style applications. Never would I want to put my customers in a situation like ePhysicians did or Dave Winer has. However, there is still the very real risk that your data on others servers will suddenly not be available to you. This is true of Hotmail, Yahoo!Mail, Source Forge, GMail.google.com, your ISP, your bank, or my stuff.

Watch out for your interests and don't assume.

Re:Newsflash...

[otisg]

I would argue that the most valuable resources that SourceForge offers are projects' CVS repositories. Those repositories are, by their very nature, typically distributed around the globe by virtue of people having their copies on their local computers.

So, SF can disappear tomorrow, without any notice, and its core value would be preserved, ready to re-incarnate on the next SF-like service.

Re:Newsflash...

[sql*kitten]

Now imagine this was SourceForge...

Or, indeed, GMail. A gigabyte is a lot. I have all my personal mail (apart from some things like mailing lists which aren't worth archiving) going back to '99 in a half-dozen .pst files (adding one almost-anually) including attachments such as PDFs, JPEGS etc, and it comes to about 600M. So I could probably fit 10 years of email into GMail, with only a minor amount of pruning. That's a lot of stuff to be completely at the whim of a publicly-traded corporation whose #1 priority by law is shareholder value.

Sure web users like stuff for free, but I make it a rule never to depend on anything free. Once money's changed hands, now you have some leverage.

Re:Newsflash...

[Anonymous Coward]

All HDs have moving parts, and eventually some part of that drive will fail physically making your data nearly inaccessable.

Only if you are silly enough to go with a provider that a) doesn't use RAID and b) doesn't watch their log files. Hard disk failure is not a new concept and there are basic methods providers use to combat it.

Re:Newsflash...

[Flingles]

Is it not that Sourceforge is hosted by many many servers around the world? There is no single person paying for bandwidth, and I imagine very few files are on only one server. Conclusion:open source rules

Re:Newsflash...

[Anonymous Coward]

"If SF went tits-up"

There would be a lot less crappy software foisted on the world in 0.19 condition.

Re:Newsflash...

[Anonymous Coward]

Offtopic: That trivia game blows. I went about 30 questions in before I quit -- not because I was feeling stumped, but because the questions were all the same. I kept alternating between three different webpages: a prime number calculator, a list of 2000 election results, and a list of Powerball scores. The only reason I didn't need a fourth page was that I could do "What movie came first?" and "How many quarters?" in my head.

BORING. Firstly, it's not a trivia game if it requires Google -- and while you could make an argument for three of those categories being "trivia," listing Powerball numbers from 1998 is NOT trivia. It's testing your research skill -- and not very well, I might add. Secondly, it's not challenging, and it's irrelevant beyond one specific type of knowledge. Where are the sports questions? Law? Literature? Religion? Current or historic events? Hell, even a different math question would be a change from "Count these coins" and "Is this prime?"

That game has nothing to do with trivia -- on top of which, it blows.

Re:Newsflash...

[Anonymous Coward]

Source Forge's downloads are being hosted on many servers around the world that are paid for by VA Software. Things like the CVS repositories are not.

Re:Newsflash...

[silicon not in the v]

you are completely at their mercy when it comes to being able to use it or losing it entirely.

And this isn't even about losing their data. It's about it being unavailable for a little while. Why is this such a problem to people? I agree that if there was something really important there that you couldn't be without for a while, you should have kept a copy locally.

Re:Newsflash...

[joggle]

Hence why I use a RAID 1 at home. Drives are cheap, might as well double up on 'em. On the downside, I use it as an excuse to not do backups as often (doesn't prevent electrical surges, rm -rf *, etc.).

Re:Newsflash...

[abertoll]

That's true... but I also think a notification BEFORE it got to the critical point of no return would have been an order too. Maybe simple notice would suffice. They don't HAVE to do it, but it would have been the nice thing to do.

Re:Newsflash...

[npsimons]

And this is also EXACTLY why I run my own web, email and file servers, and run them on open source software. Barring things that are out of my control, those servers aren't going down or going away. By making them my servers, I drastically reduce the number of things that are out of my control.

Umm...

[dotslashconfig]

So let me get this straight... He didn't know even 1 day in advance that rising costs and other technical/logistical difficulties were going to force him to shut down service? That seems rather ridiculous and is a huge oversight on his part. To not even warn people that he was having difficulties... it's mind boggling. I'm sure someone would have come to his aid, or at least tried to organize a fund to assist in maintaining service.

Honestly, though... to not see this coming even a few days in advance? That's very disappointing.

Re:Umm...

[EvanED]

If he was having problems already I'm not sure a mad rush of 3000 people trying to back up their data would have exactly helped...

Re:Umm...

[dotslashconfig]

What I mean is... if he'd given people a little more time to examine the situation - even a week would have been sufficient - people who liked his service might have tried to set up a fund-raising activity of some variety. I'm sure his users wouldn't have minded contributing a dollar or two in order to continue service.

People just needed a small amount of time to prepare, even if they wouldn't have the chance to back up their data.

In my experience, people tend to react more favorably towards disappointing situations if they have fair warning. People are a little more understanding if they have the chance to react to this news, as opposed to suddenly just seeing their information disappear.

That's why "trading curbs" were implemented on the New York Stock Exchange. People needed time to react to news that could potentially cost them money/time. It's a lot easier to deal with losses if you either see them coming, or are given a fair chance to recover from drastic swings. (A little off-topic, but I think this relates).

Re:Umm...

[rimu guy]

He has 3000 people using the service. It would have taken them some time to sign up. He would have had ample info about the cost of running the service and providing support for it.

I can only deduce that Mr. Winer's personal circumstances have changed dramatically, and that is what is causing the problem.

And I agree with the grandfather post. There should have been warning about the service change. He should have let people know they had a week or a month to move things off the server. There would have been an increase in server load. But it would have been manageable.

---
Yep, we host blogs

Re:Umm...

[EvanED]

The donation thing is a good idea... I hadn't thought of that.

Re:Umm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, let's suppose you're Dave Winer. Stay with me here.

You know that no matter what you do to close down the site, you will be flamed and people will hate you. This is true for anybody, not just Dave Winer. Imagine if slashdot closed up one day. I bet the non-paying slashdotters would complain the loudest.

And you know the traffic will go UP immediately.

You just don't want the hassle.

Also, remember you're Dave Winer and you have Dave Winer's.. let's say "unique" personality.

The only logical thing to do is close it up, wait a few days for the dust to settle, and then deal with the sycophants, leaving the rest to rot.

Re:Umm...

[SuperDuperMan]

Ultimately the service was free. People who bitch about the quality of free service should ask themselves why anyone who offers them a free service should be obligated to provide them with a level of service they could expect from a pay service.

Re:Umm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, from everything I've seen and heard, Dave Winer is not about doing "what's best for the community". Instead, Dave Winer is all about Dave Winer.

I wonder why Dave didn't transfer ownership to someone else? I'm sure someone would have picked it up... and even paid Dave for it.

Sure, it wouldn't have made anyone happy, but it wouldn't have pissed anyone off either.

Re:Umm...

[EvanED]

"I can only deduce that Mr. Winer's personal circumstances have changed dramatically, and that is what is causing the problem."

One thought I had was that maybe a DOS attack or something put him significantly over a bandwidth cap. This happened to another site I go to a few monhts ago; they lost several hundred dollars because they didn't have unlimited hosting and went well over their bandwidth cap.

Re:Umm...

[DNS-and-BIND]

These are free users...what makes you think they're going to pay a dime for anything?

Re:Umm...

[TeamLive]

How dare you do this to the community. I am going to put this on the front page of slashdot.org and gnaa.org. Lets see if you can pay your hosting costs then.
CmdrTaco 6/15/04; 11:32:29 PM

heh.. nice one, CmdrTaco. ok everyone, go browse every page on this dick's domain until he chokes on the hosting bill.

Re:Umm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Human decency in light of the massive number of man hours he took responsibility for? Basic common courtesy? I keep forgeting that where expenditures and commerce are involved all of this is considered irrelevant. Nice society you're positing there.

Re:Umm...

[sakusha]

Fundraising isn't the issue. Winer's a millionaire, he just sold his house in CA. According to the Wired Magazine biography of Winer, he paid $2 million for a house in an exclusive neighborhood, next to Joan Baez's house. Winer is sitting on millions of bucks, it's not like he couldn't afford to pay for hosting. He just decided he no longer wanted to, so he killed the blogs of everyone who wasn't his buddy (i.e. Searls). So if you haven't sucked up to Winer sufficiently, your blog is toast. Such are the tribulations of dealing with millionaire dilletantes.

Winer is freaking out. His "fellowship" at Berkman is over, he's got no job and nobody wants him around anymore, even his sycophants are no longer willing to help him find his next gig.

Re:Umm...

[cHiphead]

its like setting up a community service to help people store books, then one day without notice saying 'fuck you all, ive lost too much money on this' and chaining the doors and openly telling people they have to kiss your ass and not ever complain if they want you to bring their books outside for them. at a future date. maybe. because your an asshole.

that about sums it all up, and i even read all articles/blogs/links/bullshit.

Re:Umm...

[SuperDuperMan]

Since when did your efforts put forth on a volunteer project become more important than the expense to an individual who was offering you a free service? Whatever costs he was suffering from before would have been made even worse when he had to suffer the expense of people grabbing all those sites and doing their backups.

No matter what your complaint if you didn't backup your data that's your own damned fault. No one using that site who valued their information should have been doing so without regular and frequent backups.

Re:Umm...

[xoboots]

Honestly, though... to not see this coming even a few days in advance? That's very disappointing.

It is disappointing, agreed. Also disappointing is how much people expect from other people who, out of generosity alone, have freely provided services, technologies, learning and even community. Does making someone comfortable on your premises make you responsible to them? Perhaps. Yet shouldn't there be room for graciousness and thanks? Some may not think much of DW now but the folks who are stabbing him in the back don't seem very saintly to me either.

What is interesting to me is that any and all of these people could have hosted their blogs on their own sites on their own machines and at their own costs. This should be a lesson to everyone that shows the importance of having control over your own services.

Best regards.

Re:Umm...

[Anthony Boyd]

So if you haven't sucked up to Winer sufficiently, your blog is toast. Such are the tribulations of dealing with millionaire dilletantes.

Well shoot. I've already doled out 3 mod points here, but I'm going to give them up so I can post. Apologies to the 3 people who see their nice "+1 Informative" mods vanish.

Look, I think your post (and many of the posts here) are overly harsh. They should be harsh to an extent, because something bad has happened that didn't have to happen. Dave made a mistake. But to rip into the guy as if we're entitled? C'mon.

For those of you haven't bothered to listen to Dave's audio blog, he explains exactly the criticisms leveled here. Does the /. readership understand that Dave hasn't worked at Userland for years? He saw Userland wanted to dump the blogs and tried to move it to his own private server. This worked poorly. In the audio blog he explains that if he put the server up as-is and gave people 2 weeks to download the sites, it would have hammered his server, which was already in use for other things. You might say he should have fixed the server, and his response is already in the blog -- it would have taken a big time investment, and he's not healthy enough to do it.

I'm not saying he doesn't deserve some criticism. If you listen to his audio blog, you'll get the clear impression that he's tired of trying to help people who act as hyper-critical (about free stuff!) as some of our Slashdot posters. That's his right of course, but he could exit more gracefully, I'm sure. And posting a 3.5 meg audio blog has to hammer his server almost as much as 3000 site backups would. So there's weird stuff. But the real issue ought to be Userland. Why couldn't they host the site for 2 more weeks? They have healthy employees. They might have even been able to turn it into a business opportunity if they made it easy to migrate to Manila or another paid service.

Give the rich boy a break. He tried to do right, it didn't work out, and now he wants to stop. OK. Ask him for your blog back, and when you get it, stay the hell away from centralized servers run by a single entity. Host your own. Use my low-end phpBB Blog, or Bloxom, or anything else. Some of these blog tools are even easy.

Re:Umm...

[sirsnork]

A blog is not at all like a book. A book is a tangible item that cannot (easily) be copied or backed up. A blog is a collection of text in a DB of some kind, backing up a database is a simple thing to do.

Re:Umm...

[allism]

You don't remember the fundraiser Wikipedia had to go through several months ago to buy new hardware? They ended up raising the $20K they needed and then some...

Re:Umm...

[sakusha]

You seem to be operating under some mistaken assumptions. Winer still owns Userland. He is being disingenuous when he says he no longer runs Userland. Maybe he doesn't hold the official title of CEO, but he still owns the company, and it is operated under his direction.
You also seem to be assuming that this hostility towards Winer is unjustified because he gave out these services for free. I assure you from personal experience that Winer treats you like shit even if you're a paying customer.
You also seem to believe it when Dave says he's getting out of the hosting business. Wrong again. He's just killing off the FREE weblogs (with the exception of his suck-up buddies like Searls). His servers still host the paid customers of Radio Userland, hosted on radio.weblogs.com, so he can't dump all of weblogs.com like he claims he's doing. The big question is why did he have all those websites moved to HIS server if they were paid customers of Userland?
You also seem to think these criticisms are unnecessarily harsh. I disagree. Winer is notorious for baiting people, then editing the exchange of messages. His usual tactic is to say something offensive, then someone responds in a similarly hotheaded manner, then Winer edits his original remark to something innocuous, so it seems like the response is a completely flaming response to a polite remark. So it is not too surprising that people jump at the chance to respond to Winer's insanity in a forum that isn't controlled by Winer. These remarks are quite civil by Winer's standards of conduct.

Re:Umm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, I think your post (and many of the posts here) are overly harsh.

You know what? If this were the first time I had run across Dave Winer, I would agree. But Dave is constantly pulling these kinds of stunts and worse. It's not funny any more.

He saw Userland wanted to dump the blogs and tried to move it to his own private server.

The thing is, it was Userland that made the free blog offer in the first place, and at no point were the users told that Userland didn't want them any more. Dave quietly tried to shift them to a substandard server that couldn't handle them, and it blew up in his face, so he just said "to hell with it" and dumped the ones he didn't like. You'd think he'd be apologetic, right? From the front page of his website, talking about an article on this shutdown:

No question, Orlowski is writing comedy. I laughed five times reading this.

Are those the words of somebody who regrets this travesty?

By the way, there's a reason I quoted it rather than just link - Dave is in the habit of posting inflammatory stuff to his website, and once people start getting pissed off, removing it. His policy is that you aren't allowed to link to him before 10PM.

Re:Umm...

[thedillybar]

He didn't know even 1 day in advance that rising costs...

If he would've known 1 day ago, he probably would've shut the service down 1 day ago.

It's not a matter of when he found out; it was a matter of saving his ass as soon as he did. Who can blame him?

Re:Umm...

[Anthony Boyd]

Maybe he doesn't hold the official title of CEO, but he still owns the company, and it is operated under his direction.

Well, in his blog he says, "I have not worked there for over two years." If he's actually lying or stretching the truth a whole lot, then you're right, he's a dick. If he's telling the truth and you're just so pissed at him that you have to get one more pot-shot in, then you're a dick. Somebody's a dick, I don't know who. But the point is that it doesn't matter anymore. Why? Because he's getting out. OK? If you're so upset with his handling of free accounts, well, congratulations. Dave is marginalizing himself and providing a perfect opportunity for others to come in and do better. So cheer up. Get your blog back on July 1st, wave goodbye to him, and let him walk away.

You also seem to believe it when Dave says he's getting out of the hosting business. Wrong again.

So what if he has paid hosting? Take your business elsewhere! Why stress yourself out interacting with someone who "treats you like shit even if you're a paying customer"? Stop being a paying customer!

So it is not too surprising that people jump at the chance to respond to Winer's insanity in a forum that isn't controlled by Winer.

Fair enough. But it's also fair for other people to wonder where exactly the problem is. Free or paid, the solution is in front of you.

Re:Umm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, and don't forget the Kuro5hin fundraising either, and the CMF fiasco...

Re:Umm...

[RedWizzard]

For those of you haven't bothered to listen to Dave's audio blog, he explains exactly the criticisms leveled here.

I've listened to it. It didn't explain my criticisms. Maybe you can:

He saw Userland wanted to dump the blogs and tried to move it to his own private server. This worked poorly.

So Winer knew what hardware weblogs.com ran on, found some other (presumably lesser) hardware to move them to and was then suprised when it didn't work? Why couldn't he determine what hardware would be required in advance? Why did he decide to leave the hardest sites until last? Does that not sound like a bass-ackwards way of doing it? I thought this guy was supposed to be an IT professional.

The management change that resulted in the free blogs being dropped happened 6 months ago. Why has Winer waited until the old service is not available to tell people their data is unavailable? The "heads-up" he talks about should have happened months ago, before the migration to this unsuitable server. His claim that people would just have found some other problem to complain about is a straw-man, and to me highlights Winer's arrogance.

You might say he should have fixed the server, and his response is already in the blog -- it would have taken a big time investment, and he's not healthy enough to do it.

Fine, find or pay someone else to do it. It's not like the guy is poor. Solicit donations if necessary. I'm sure the 3000 users he just screwed over would have been willing to chip in. For that matter I'm sure one of those people would have been able to do the work necessary to get everything running.

Why do users have to request to have their blog exported? Surely he's not exporting them one at a time manually, so how can it be more work to export them all than to sort through a list and export only the ones that asked nicely? Why not just zip them all up and email them to their owners? Or set up an FTP site just for the owners. That couldn't cost much.

And what are the legal ramifications? AFAIK, the content of those blogs is still owned by the authors, if he's holding it so that it is inaccessible to them that amounts to theft, doesn't it?

Re:Umm...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are dead wrong. If Slashdot got closed, all you loose is the ability to view content. In this case, you are prevented from updating, migrating the content that you own. There is a big difference.

Second, because of the nature of the problem, that is you have a site which you update from time to time and that some readers follow you, you should have the ability to migrate earlier, something like a grace period.

I don't who mods you up, but you and they miss the point completely. It is not that he closes a free service, it is the way he does it.

A proper analogy would be, your bank says it is providing free checking account, although it costs money to Bank to maintain it, you put your money to the bank. The bank suddenly closes all accounts and doesn't allow you to access your money and it says that only paying customers will be able to access their money. There is a profound difference between closing the accounts with and without notice. The bank may very well have every right to do that, but not giving notice will definitely upset people, not that they close the free checking accounts, but that you are no longer able to access to your money.

Re:Umm...

[SuperDuperMan]

and taking your book would be stealing. Taking your database that you could easily (and should have done anyway) copy to make a backup. This should be a wake up call to those who lost their blog. If it's important to you back it up. If it's really important perhaps you should pay for a commercial host so you aren't leeching off of somebody.

Re:Umm...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, mate, "disingenuous" is knowing the difference between owning a company and running a company, and pretending not to.

Re:Umm...

[DNS-and-BIND]

No, I have a life, I don't live vicariously through my online existence.

Re:Umm...

[Anonymous Coward]

But the point is that it doesn't matter anymore. Why? Because he's getting out.

Yeah, right. Once upon a time he told everyone that he was leaving RSS development. A year later, he released the RSS 2.0 specification, leapfrogging the hard work everybody else put in on RSS 1.0 and forking the format.

You'll forgive me if I don't believe him this time either.

Re:Umm...

[nacturation]

And what are the legal ramifications? AFAIK, the content of those blogs is still owned by the authors, if he's holding it so that it is inaccessible to them that amounts to theft, doesn't it?

Oh, give me a break. If I voluntarily upload my stuff to your server, how is that theft? I imagine if he started charging, it would then become extortion and kidnapping, right? That's about the lamest argument I've ever heard, which means that in a California court it'll probably work.

Re:Umm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Red Wizzard wrote: "Why do users have to request to have their blog exported?"

Dave Winer is right. Even if he does something to help the freeloaders, you guys whine. You're proving his point.

Re:Umm...

[bitserf]

cool, you read slashdot too? glad my backup DNS server is hosted at rimu :)

Re:Umm...

[segfault7375]

Why would posting to the Greater Nashville Auburn Association cause a slashdotting?

Re:Umm...

[Anonymous Coward]

With 1600+ comments, somehow I doubt that...

Re:Umm...

[dasmegabyte]

And the guy from this webcomic dared his readers to help him quit his shitty job. They raised over $22,000 in less than a month.

But this won't work for everyone. If you want to offer people a service, you should sell access to it or expect to pay it for ever.

Re:Umm...

[yellowhousejake]

I agree, this is not new. I found a lot of old friends on the Zope and PHP lists after Frontier 5 went from free to paid subscription. *After* all the developers poured their hearts and souls into it for him. Dave does as Dave does, and anyone who expected different was a fool.

Re:Umm...

[rocketjesus]

Fair enough. But it's also fair for other people to wonder where exactly the problem is.

Because there's a public need to be served by warning people away from dealing with Dave Winer. He will, at first, seem to be a nice guy with some personal quirks. They're easy to overlook, and the benefits seem to outweigh the negatives. However, the negatives slowly build up until one day something happens to make you realize it's just not worth putting up with his crap. It's usually something huge, rather than a straw that breaks the camel's back, it's a pile of bricks out of nowhere.

I suspect that the people bitching about this here just had the pile of bricks dumped on them.

Unfortuantely, by the time that happens you've already invested tons of time and energy into whatever it was you were working on using his stuff, and it's not just a simple matter of switching providers. It could set your schedule back by months or years to switch to some other platform, or (as in this case) you could lose a significant percentage of readers who won't be able to find your stuff because you had to change URLs without warning.

Plus, bitching about assholes is good therapy.

Personally, I used to froth and rant about what a dick Dave is whenever the subject came up, but now I just think he's bipolar. He can't help it, he's just sick and not medicated.

Re:Umm...

[cHiphead]

you're average blogger doesnt-know-shit about databases and how to back them up, they got their blog script running and dont want to touch anything as long as its work. the point, outside the ability to back things up, is that he is being an outright jackass about it all, after running a community service for so long then "suddenly" deciding he was too broke to continue it and shutting it down without notice.

Wired article

[Tekmage]

Wired has an article up as well, with a bit more detail.

Re:Wired article

[skaffen42]

From the Wired article: "I just have my fingers crossed that my girlfriend gets her blog back," said software programmer Tom Gortell. "She feels like someone just sucked out her brains. I don't get it, it's just an online journal, right? But she feels like her entire life has been stolen."

The guy works as a programmer and he never told her to make backups? And then he tells Wired that he doesn't get why she is upset. Somebody better e-mail him the number of a good florist.

But seriously, he should have told her to make backups. Free service. You get what you pay for. What more can you say?

Re:Wired article

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh...Ok, except that link does work, pefectly fine in fact. What are you on about?

Re:Wired article

[randyest]

No, it means your DNS cache is hosed or something -- the link works fine for me.

Blogging pioneer Dave Winer unexpectedly closed Weblogs.com, his free blog-hosting service, on Sunday, leaving thousands of bloggers without access to their blogs.

Blogs affected by the shutdown now redirect to a generic message posted by Winer.

Wireless Hot Spot Directory

Today's the Day. Some bloggers are screaming that the shutdown is a serial "blog murder." Other bloggers slammed the people whose blogs have vanished from the Internet, saying that no one should expect continuity from a free service.

"Oh boo hoo ... if you forked over the money for hosting like any serious site owner, you wouldn't now be pissing and moaning about 'blog murder,'" one comment read. "Putting your site on a CentralizedShinyWidget like weblogs.com or blogger.com is like moving into a house built of sugar cubes in the tropics, and then crying foul when the monsoon comes."

"So because it's free, people should bite their tongues about having their content wiped off the face of the earth with no warning?" responded another blogger, posting anonymously. "He couldn't even give them 30 minutes' notice to back stuff up?"

And many bloggers simply posted messages thanking Winer for the memories and politely requested a copy of their blog's contents.

In an audio message posted late Monday explaining his reasons for the shutdown, Winer cited the financial costs of hosting the sites, technical difficulties in moving the blogs to a new server, stress and personal health issues as the reasons for the sudden shutdown.

Winer, who has offered free hosting to bloggers for the past four years, has promised to make exportable copies of blog contents available to the blogs' owners at their request. He says it will take at least two weeks to provide copies of the blogs' contents.

Meanwhile, the affected bloggers cannot access their work, a situation that angers many, who said they believed they should have been given advance notice that the Weblogs service would be terminated before their sites became inaccessible.

"The transition for the bloggers and the readers would have been far smoother and less painful if they had been warned," wrote David Weinberger, author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, on his blog. "(But) Dave's point in his audio blog is that the transition wouldn't have been smooth from the host's point of view, and that a sudden cut-off was necessary.

"Second, why the two-week wait? That's going to be painful for the thousands of bloggers, many of whom are my friends," Weinberger continued. "Again, I assume that Dave is correctly estimating the amount of work it will take to package up several thousand sites. If I thought he were either incompetent or making people wait out of meanness, I'd flame him."

"I just did the best I could," said Winer, in his audio message. "This is not a company here ... this is a person. To expect company-type service ... that's just not going to happen."

Winer also added in his audio message that he believed no matter how he had handled the shutdown, people would have complained.

"On the Internet ... it hardly matters how well you do something, certain things happen and people will jump up and down. Just accept that," Winer said.

But some bloggers said that a little advance notice was all they asked of Winer.

"This can't be a sudden whim, Dave had to know this was in the works." said blogger Nancy Velton. "I'd have appreciated a chance to make copies of my material, and move my blog to another service. My entire life is in that blog."

Winer, a founder of Userland software, a provider of website and weblog publishing tools for organizations and individuals, had been hosting the blogs on Userland's servers. He left the company several years ago. After a recent change of management, U

Re:Wired article

[mothz]

You're surprised that some members of the tech-savvy programming crowd don't understand the value of making backups. Whatever. Personally, I was more shocked to learn that some members of that crowd have girlfriends.

Re:Wired article

[DAldredge]

And that is why one does NOT let programmers make HW decisions by themselves ;->

Re:Wired article

[Anonymous Coward]

Judging from what I witness every day at work, programmers are the worst losers IT has to offer. Just above fieldservice and helpdesk.

No offense to the few good and cool programmers out there, but the point is that "programmer" - like "web designer" - are not automatic designations for competente people.

Re:Wired article

[DNS-and-BIND]

Sucked out her brains because her blog that she didn't back up got taken offline?

Sounds like a blessing in disguise if you ask me. A web log is not your life...jeez.

Re:Wired article

[GileadGreene]

Some bloggers are screaming that the shutdown is a serial "blog murder."

Seems more like parallel murder to me, since it all happened at once...

Re:Wired article

[NineBall]

It is for this loser.

Re:Wired article

[IronChef]

You can only tell someone to make backups so often before you are sleeping on the couch. Sometimes they have to learn the hard way.

Coincidentally, today I backed up my critical stuff onto 3 DVD-RW's and one IDE disk which is now stored in my secret underground lair. I am feeling pretty smug, bring on the lightning and house fires...

Re:Wired article

[Moraelin]

No offense taken. I'm a programmer, and half the people I see in this line of work are incompetent burger-flippers. Who only got hired because some "smart" beancounter thought he's cleverly saving money by hiring the cheapest monkeys. Except they have mental trouble even tying their shoelaces, forwarding emails or cutting and pasting.

(True story, and I swear to God I'm not making it up: every month I have to clean up my overflowing inbox at work, because some "programmer" mailed me a 24 bit full-screen screenshot to show me an error message displayed in telnet, or in whatever log viewer they were using. It takes work to teach them to copy and past that error message. What took the cake, though, was seeing an attached 24 bit full-screen screenshot of... an email in Outlook. Poor man's substitute for "forward".)

I would, however, disaggree with the assessment that even these are "just above" field service and helpdesk. You haven't seen the service and helpdesk, then. _Some_ of those make the "programmers" above look like brilliant geniuses.

The proper IT people here gave us PCs with Matrox drivers installed... and a Nvidia card. And the wrong IDE drivers. Anything except installing from the CD with the backed-up standard NT4 config is _miles_ over their head.

If you call them because your Outlook '97 (corporate standard, you see) crapped and now throws an error message on startup, as happened to a couple of co-workers, they'll want to format the HDD and reinstall that holy standard CD.

I swear to God I'm not making it up.

So basically, yeah, I'm with you there. Just because someone's job says "programmer", doesn't automatically mean that they can actually program or administer a computer. Or what a backup is.

Don't get me wrong. I also do know a whole bunch of good competent programmers. But also about 3 times as many whose only merit was being shameless enough to lie to an incompetent HR droid.

Re:Wired article

[obender]

You are lucky to get emails with screenshot images. I get emails with MS Word documents that contain pasted screenshot images. That is when I don't get them by fax.

Re:Wired article

[Some Bitch]

The proper IT people here gave us PCs with Matrox drivers installed... and a Nvidia card. And the wrong IDE drivers. Anything except installing from the CD with the backed-up standard NT4 config is _miles_ over their head.

I would submit that the error was made in the back office and is not the fault of the support guy. Desktop support is a bitch and if you can't even rely on your standard image to be properly configured it's going to be utter Hell. Proper images are important, an NT/2000/XP install takes MUCH longer than restoring an image of the OS. Would you prefer to lose your productivity for 10 minutes or for an hour? It's all about providing the best service you can as quickly as possible.

If you call them because your Outlook '97 (corporate standard, you see) crapped and now throws an error message on startup, as happened to a couple of co-workers, they'll want to format the HDD and reinstall that holy standard CD.

That's stupid. Reimaging the OS/core apps should not wipe the user areas of the disk. If it does then your IT department are way way behind the curve.

We're not all monkeys you know, some of us do a good job and take a lot of pride in it.

Re:Wired article

[tehcyder]

What took the cake, though, was seeing an attached 24 bit full-screen screenshot of... an email in Outlook. Poor man's substitute for "forward".

Now I know why my IT department hates me. Thanks.

Re:Wired article

[Anonymous Coward]

"But she feels like her entire life has been stolen."
I'm thinking that it's time to:
a)Dump the chick that feels more secure telling the entire world about her issues than her own boyfriend
b)Buy her a diary and pen
c)Tell her nobody cares about her idiotic, bandwidth wasting, mentally unstable, attention craving, blog
d)More slashdot, less girlfriend
e)All the above

Re:Wired article

[Moraelin]

Again, I'm not saying that everyone in any line of work is a clueless monkey. There are a bunch competent programmers, competent managers, competent support people, competent web designers, etc. But also a bunch of very very bad ones. And a whole bunch somewhere between the two extremes.

Basically all the point I'm trying to make is that you can't say "oh, he's a programmer, he should have known about backups, and a whole lot of other stuff about computers." In practice, he might or he might not. Being a programmer could mean anything between PhD in CS and someone who doesn't even know what a backup is. Or what that funny "forward" button in Outlook does.

Re:Wired article

[bandrzej]

Maybe we can harass the power of the parallel murder as a one time energy source...to power the blogger server! Hmmm...

Crystal Ball

[Anonymous Coward]

I can forsee quite a few people complaining about this in their weblogs.

Oh...wait...

Re:Crystal Ball

[Anonymous Coward]

If someone wrote a weblog and no one read it, would it still be a silly, self indulgent thing to do?

Audio recordings

[AirLace]

The most interesting thing is that Winer announced the withdrawal of service through a poorly recorded audio file. Could it be that he's been struck down with RSI?

Whatever the case, I think he could have shut down the service gracefully, perhaps handing it over to a friend or a third party rather than abruptly pulling the plug. But at the end of the day, he's only damaged his own reputation -- it's not the end of the world for anyone.

Re:Audio recordings

[Anonymous Coward]

Could it be that he's been struck down with RSI?

Dave's had ongoing heart trouble caused by smoking (so it's self-inflicted, but he has given up now).

And this is bad news?

[jm92956n]

I just saw this over at Halley's place and went to Tom's blog and read Dave's post on Tom's private weblog. Tom is traveling back from Mexico, not sure if he's landed yet, but I doubt that the first thing on his mind is how hard Dave Winer wants his old Manilla users to blow him in this special "one-time" offer.

Good riddance! I don't understand how one could possibly read such crap.

I scratched my nose a little and then depressed the 'W' key, knowing full well the corresponding character would henceforth be displayed in its full glory!

Re:And this is bad news?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good lord, that's pathetic. At the same time, it represents the only thing the "blogosphere" has accomplished: rampant self-reference and metareference.

"Tom said that Julie said that Dave said that he saw on a message board that some guy named Marc said that Chris said that Paul said that there was a rumor that weblogs.com might go down!"

Take that, traditional media outlets. Your days are numbered.

Re:And this is bad news?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have to.

You also don't have the right to dictate what can and can't go on the Internet.

So put up with it. No one's forcing you to read it.

ha

[2057]

I honestly laughed when I read the article summary. Anyone with me? "They only say its scenic when they seen it from a distant" - Platypus Complex(coldduckcomplex.com)

Re:Ha

[Dissectional]

Blow hards attract blow hards. Much like flies are attracted to shit. Thing is, people DO give a shit about blogs - because there's a lot of idiots out there who enjoy them.

Ironic

[shadowmatter]

Having your blogging service totally shut you out without notice finally seems like the perfect thing to blog about.

- sm

Re:Ironic

[Rolo Tomasi]

Blog to the hand, cause the server ain't listening.

Re:Ironic

[vranash]

Nah, blog to the keyboard, cuz the system ain't listenin ;p

-- vranash

before the winer-hating starts...

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when Winer started the site. It was Userland released their blogging software a while back, before blogging was really popular. I thought it was mostly to show off the software and let people "get started". It was not meant to host high-traffic public sites.

Winer says that he will export the sites after July 1. I don't know why he insists "after July 1", or why he didn't say "I am closing them down in X days" but he's pretty stubborn sometimes.

So, I'm not really surprised. I personally wouldn't depend on a third party storing my site for free, without even a local backup.

Re:before the winer-hating starts...

[Zibblsnrt]

Winer says that he will export the sites after July 1.

Provided people ask in a specific, formulaic manner which betrays no unhappiness at the decision. Power trip? Uhhyep.

-PS

Re:before the winer-hating starts...

[hdparm]

There is also a link on Dave's home page - Doc Searls (one of the bloggers affected) provides a bit more info. If he understands, I am really at loss as to why /. readers who are not directly affected have to flame this guy.

Re:before the winer-hating starts...

[Anonymous Coward]

"I am really at loss as to why /. readers who are not directly affected have to flame this guy.

Well, because Dave has one of those nice-guy-until-he-forgets-to-take-his-meds personalities. If you catch one of his bizarre backhands once or twice (don't forget he's done more than just Manila), you don't only tend to stay away from him, you also tend to remember him uncharitably.

So he's getting flamed more than the average joe would.

From the Wired piece, "People have been really afraid to discuss this," said a New York blogger who asked that his name be withheld. "There's a lot of concern that any nasty comments will result in Dave not getting around to making a copy of your blog. I think a lot of the politeness and 'We love you, Dave!' sentiments that you're seeing in some Web posts is just pure paranoia."

That's no joke. That's a direct result of Dave's past behaviour.

Re:before the winer-hating starts...

[RedWizzard]

Doc Searls (one of the bloggers affected) provides a bit more info.

Um, Doc Searls is quite clearly not one of the bloggers affected - his blog is still up. Clearly he's got special treatment, but how does that help the 2999 other bloggers who have no chance of seeing their data for another two weeks?

Re:before the winer-hating starts...

[RedWizzard]

For an example of this, just look at this thread.

Re:before the winer-hating starts...

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh why not just slashdot his personal servers? It's almost more effective than a DDoS attack.

Re:before the winer-hating starts...

[adamofgreyskull]

Not wanting 3000 whiny fucking bloggers to insult and attack him? Uhhyep.

Re:before the winer-hating starts...

[Zibblsnrt]

Awww, poor widdle walking ego made his bed and doesn't wanna lie in it? Painted himself into a corner and expects accolades? Poor darling, watch me sympathise.

Not.

Granted, I suppose it's alright for him to do that because they're just blogs, and not something important like someone's Slashdot account or whatthehellhaveyou. Either way, the phrase "suck it down and live with it" should apply to both parties.

-PS

Re:before the winer-hating starts...

[Anonymous Coward]

His server, his rules.

Don't like it? Get your own.

Re:before the winer-hating starts...

[Zibblsnrt]

Oh, sure, it's his server and rules. I've never once argued that.

It's perfectly possible for someone to act within their rights and still be an asshole about it, though, and that's exactly what this guy did - and is.

-PS

Re:before the winer-hating starts...

[pudge]

I am really at loss as to why /. readers who are not directly affected have to flame this guy.

It's called "karma."

Hmmm.

[James A. S. Joyce]

Seems more and more people are turning against blogs. :-(

Kinda reminds me of this Kuro5hin article.

3000 bloggers

[loid_void]

...being found guilty, I sentence you to a public blogging.

could it be..

[Anonymous Coward]

that the reason he didnt give any notice would be cause of the rush and heavy load of people going to backup their stuff? I mean thats like getting slashdotted.

You know what they say...

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus saves and backs up nightly!

Re:You know what they say...

[Bnonn]

Actually, that's a common theological fallacy. Jesus saves, but only Buddha makes incremental backups.

Re:You know what they say...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get it. Maybe I just don't know enough about buddhism. Can you explain this joke to me. I am honestly curious. Thanks.

Re:You know what they say...

[Anonymous Coward]

it's probably to do with the reincarnation. However, I'd worry if my backups achieved enlightenment and went to a higher plain of existence.

(Yes, I don't know much about Buddhism either).

Re:You know what they say...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, that's a common theological fallacy. Jesus saves, but only Buddha makes incremental backups.

I don't think that Buddha does anything...

Re:You know what they say...

[gl4ss]

..what good is a backup when nobody knows where you'll restore?

jesus better use some forwarder (that he will have absolute control over) to the blog as his visible address as well..

Re:You know what they say...

[rocketjesus]

..what good is a backup when nobody knows where you'll restore?

This is the smartest thing I've ever seen on slashdot.

What the hell are you doing here?

jesus better use some forwarder (that he will have absolute control over) to the blog as his visible address as well..

Aw, well, shit. Now I'm boned.

I feel a disturbance in the force.

[hayden]

It's as though a couple of thousand babbling idiots were suddenly silenced.

Re:I feel a disturbance in the force.

[DAldredge]

Why, did kuro5hin.org close? :->

Re:I feel a disturbance in the force.

[oliverthered]

what there shutting dowm slashdot too..

looks like I'll be doing a bit more work then.

Disaster!

[xsupergr0verx]

If all those 15 year old girls have a tragedy happen to them like this, where are they going to put it? No blog!

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Trippy

Re:Disaster!

[loid_void]

They all moved over to schoolscandals.

Re:Disaster!

[oliverthered]

There paedophiles disguised as 15 year old girls.

Jesus some people will wank over the slightest hint of white cotton panties and a gym slip....

Right back to the blogging.

Re:Disaster!

[randyest]

Ouch. That is the most disturbing site I've ever seen.

I've gotta go weep for the future.

Seriously.

Re:Disaster!

[loid_void]

Yup, very disturbing, blows away Mean Girls, and keep in mind, it is what they are doing everyday in school, but to see it in print, like a billboard, makes your skin crawl. After you get over the shock of it all, you can find some funny stuff, but it's few and far between. Finally, it's an anthropologist's goldmine, or cesspool.

Re:Disaster!

[Ohreally_factor]

That was cruel. Goatse is preferable to that. Oh well, to each his own.

Or not, it makes no technical sense.

[metalhed77]

If he'd given a month's notice it would be negligible. Only 3000 weblogs? That's it? Since they're mostly text I can't imagine each one being backed up with a wget -mirror having any significant effect on anything. One highly trafficked weblog probably generates as much traffic as a day as a whole backup of 3000 blogs, even with years of entries does. I mean it's almost all very textual HTML. I doubt it was bandwidth.

He should have been more polite.

that's horrible

[enrico_suave]

... not that it's closing, but that it's so sudden... he should have known if this was coming and been forthright about it, instead of pulling the roberto duran "no mas"

blah

e.

Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

Never EVER trust some one else to do your backups.

To the poor idiots who have lost "4 years of data" -- you should have realized this was a very real posability. Even if it was due to hardware failure....Sadly, this was due to the expense of running a web site.

Not just *any* blog host

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just any Blog Hosting Service.

Dave Winer's blog hosting service.

Coool!

Re:Not just *any* blog host

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you mean blogosphere celebrity Dave Winer? What an honour!

Re:Not just *any* blog host

[Maserati]

Posted anonymously.... methinks somebody has a lot of data sitting on Dave's server.

Re:Not just *any* blog host

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, No. Methinks someone doesn't get the joke.

Re:Not just *any* blog host

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, No. Methinks someone doesn't get the joke.

hello

[Anonymous Coward]

AC here...

Is it just me or anyone who "blogs" deserve to be beaten? What about those people who read other people's "blogs"? I think they should bet the blogger then each other. That's the plan to get this infestation off the net.

Thank you for your support

hatelife.org

[Zugok]

This happened to hatelife.org a few weeks ago as well, and there were a lot of people hating life a lot more than they ordinariuly would have been to. Basically Steve, the maintainer said his time with hatelife was done. People pissed and moaned about his canning hatelife and before I knew it, hatelife was taken off.

Re:hatelife.org

[vanillacoke]

I know, i'm still mad about it. It hurts to find out your journal is gone but NO WAY TO CONTACT HIM TO GET IT BACK. This makes me even more mad.

Re:hatelife.org

[Zugok]

hmm I wonder what ytou can actually do about that. Especially as I recall in his FAQ that the journal belongs to who ever wrote it. Now Steve has taken it down and buggered off somewhere untraceable. When I saw that Steve was taking hatelife down I copied and pasted my journal into a text document. there was no way I was losing that stuff.

Re:hatelife.org

[vanillacoke]

See i thought about doing that long ago, but i was like "naw, Steve would never fuck us over like that"....

Once he moved to Texas to be with that girl, everything went to shit :(

I don't care if I get modded down, I'm airing the dirty laundry.

Re:hatelife.org

[Zugok]

anyhoos, nice to meet a fellow hatelifer who is also a slashdotter :)

I guess this is just another example..

[Kwil]

..of the lesson: You get what you pay for.

Too bad it applies to Television Programming as well.

Re:I guess this is just another example..

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention open source.

Re:I guess this is just another example..

[Anonymous Coward]

... and politicians too, sadly.

Sometimes you get what you paid for...

[Vellmont]

In this case since it's a free service no one should have any expectations of anything. Why did he take it down so quickly? Maybe because he didn't want to be tempted to keep it going, didn't want to listen to whining people, whatever. It's his damn website, his bandwidth, etc.

The audio recording says he got backed into a corner moving sites onto a new server, and he didn't want to spend any more time on the project. Welcome to free services.

Re:Sometimes you get what you paid for...

[Anonymous Coward]

"...whatever. It's his damn website, his bandwidth, etc."

And his reputation. Which takes two to tango.

Seriously, there is a reply to all these "what do you expect from free services" shrugs. Reputation is tangible. It shows up in spreadsheets. You think Nike just makes shoes? They are worth quite a bit more than their physical assets.

There was no money exchanged over these weblogs, but there was definitely trading in reputation. Hence there are very definitely expectations.

Re:Sometimes you get what you paid for...

[LMariachi]

Let's say we carpool -- I give you a ride to work every morning, no charge. One day I just decide not to pick you up, without any phone call or anything, you wind up having to take the bus once it becomes apparent that I'm not coming, you're two hours late for work, you get fired. Should I expect you not to bear any grievance against me? After all, you can't bitch about free services, right?

Re:Sometimes you get what you paid for...

[demi]

This is a good example--another one is the principle of right-of-way. If I allow you to use part of my property, for example, to get to a stream, for a few years, I am not within my rights to simply stop your access--you have acquired through use a legitimate right-of-way (this is in the US). Further, your right-of-way is even transferable and whoever I sell the property to has to accommodate you as well.

There is a similar principle underlying common-law marriage and palimony, and it's real.

Re:Sometimes you get what you paid for...

[Vellmont]

That just isn't the same thing and you know it. What you describe in your analogy are social rules between two people. This isn't a social situation between two people, it's one guy giving away service to thousands. There's no personal relationship between this guy and his multitude of users. No friendship, nada. It's more like I'm giving away free candy every day to anyone that shows up at the door. Thousands of people take me up on the offer. One day I decide it's too much of a burden and stop offering the free candy.

Shouldn't you be greatful that someone offered you free candy and not whine about what a rotten person they are for not bothering to tell you ahead of time?

Analogies don't prove anything of course, but they do illustrate a point. I guess if people get used to something being free (and free services in general) then some tend to forget that the free thing is provided at the will of the provider, and is not an expectation.

Re:Sometimes you get what you paid for...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ooooo! His reputation with angsty teens is tanking!

I'm sure he's terrified.

Re:Sometimes you get what you paid for...

[LMariachi]

How does the number of people involved change the basic standards of common courtesy? Are you only civil to your friends? Replace the car in my analogy with a really big bus and the "you" with "y'all."

A blog may not be as essential as staying employed, but it's not as trivial as "free candy" either. If you're handing out free lunches and the neighborhood chidren come to rely on them for sustenance, of course you're technically within your rights to suddenly stop, but the decent thing to do is tell them beforehand so they can arrange to get a sandwich someplace else.

Re:Sometimes you get what you paid for...

[Vellmont]

There's no personal relationship between thousands of people. Common courtesy? He's already extended common courtesy by giving the damn hosting away for free. He's also going to provide the data to anyones blog to the owners. That's not enough for you?

I honestly do believe that the blog is as trivial as free candy. All the whiners who "have my whole life in that blog" need to get a life. It's just text, and it's mostly just crappy text. They sound like people whining about their Everquest character.

Thankfully not LiveJournal

[Anonymous Coward]

At least LiveJournal didn't shut down without notice. Otherwise we'd all be up tonight digging mass graves for disfranchised teenagers all over the world.

Re:Thankfully not LiveJournal

[christowang]

But if it's down for 30 seconds, or if they change a feature, at least 3000+ users are up in arms saying how could they do this to them.

When they added post/comment limiting, I never seen so many angry Internet users in my life. What a surprise that most of the people complaining were the Free Users, because teenagers can't afford $25 a year to get the restrictions removed. Doesn't an N Sync CD cost about $25?

Re:Thankfully not LiveJournal

[josh3736]

Doesn't an N Sync CD cost about $25?

...about, but you have to consider two factors:

1. This is the age group most inclined to get anything and everything they can off Kazaa. Teens have a very limited cashflow and $25 not spent on a CD/website/whatever is a week's worth of food.
2. Teens don't have credit cards. If they want to buy something off the web, they have to get a parent's card. This is usually hard or impossible.

So, they have to go for the free hosting. Of course, being greedy bastards, they'll whine and bitch for a week.

Re:Thankfully not LiveJournal

[mlk]

Doesn't an N Sync CD cost about $25?

Last I checked, buying an N Sync CD would cost you your soul.
And your pride if anyone ever found out.

Re:Thankfully not LiveJournal

[Anonymous Coward]

it's disenfranchised, asshole

Re:Thankfully not LiveJournal

[rsadelle]

For a lot of teenagers, LJ is a place to complain about mom and dad, amongst other things. They certainly wouldn't want their parents knowing about their LJ, even if their parents would be willing to let them use the credit card.

It was a free service

[winkydink]

The users got what they paid for.

Re:Umm...got bandwidth cost?

[itallushrt]

Exactly. He wasn't going to alert 3000+ users to only have them suddenly spike his bandwidth cost for the month through the roof. Even with or without 95th percentile billing.

Re:Not any more then normal traffic really..

[cbreaker]

Considering that the majority of the data is displayed on users' browsers, they could have shut down the sites but allowed the owners of the blogs to grab the data. It would probably have been less traffic in the few days before shutdown then normal traffic.

Pay attention

[Trigulus]

RTFA seems silly for this article so heres a pre-emptive LTTFA! I had no idea this guy was such a stoner!

The bastards should at least refund them.

[yuri benjamin]

Bastards! I'd want my money back! - oh wait - it was a free service.

Re:The bastards should at least refund them.

[Anonymous Coward]

u r !fun-e.

Re:Backups, Who needs em...

[Sovern]

Why do most users fail to backup most of thier important data until it is to late? Is it the same mentality that has large numbers of Seattlites driving without insurance because they "won't get in a wreck"? What is it?

1. It is the expectation that things will always work because they always have.
Or
2. They lack the skills or facilities to actually make a backup of thier blogs and user base.
Or
3. The tried and true "it will never happen to me"

understanding

[sewagemaster]

As might be expected, reactions range from understanding to enraged.

and we shall show our "understanding" by having their site posted and slashdotting their site...

Re:understanding

[marmoset]

"I plead the fizzith!" ;)

Hmm...

[Slipped_Disk]

And THIS, ladies and gentlemen, is why I host MY little blog-like thing on MY OWN site, using MY OWN crappy software. That way I KNOW backups are getting done, and I KNOW when the machine will be down, and if something goes wrong I can fix it MY OWN DAMN SELF.

Sorry if I seem a little callous, but really how hard is it to write a few hundred lines of PHP for a simple online journal with comments? NOT VERY! And it runs on the same machine I use for all my other stuff (DNS, Mail, CVS) so it's not like I'm spending untold thousands extra each month, it really helps make the cost-benefit ratio of my server more tolerable.

Think about it.

Re:Hmm...

[metamatic]

Who needs a couple of hundred lines of anything, let alone PHP?

Just download blosxom. 100 lines of code. Works with any ISP, even if you don't have CGI.

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ooh, you said "Think about it." That really makes me stop and think.

Hmm..

Thinking...

About...

It..

Re:Hmm...

[}InFuZeD{]

Last I checked, ISPs didn't care what server side language pages are generated by ;)

And Blosxom is written in Perl, so just in case you actually meant "Works with any host"... well that's not the case.

Re:Hmm...

[Ohreally_factor]

Here's the link:

Blosxom

I've used Blosxom, and it pretty much rocks. I haven't used the latest version, with the plug in architecture, but it looks sweet.

Re:Hmm...

[dcam]

Umm I count 444 lines of code.

Re:Hmm...

[Platinum Dragon]

IIRC, it does require mod_cgi and CGI Perl modules.

I should know. I'm running it on my own webserver--and loving it. If you're looking for a barebones weblog script that doesn't require anything but bog-standard basic HTML in the entries, you're set. If you want to muck around with plugins, you have the power.

For someone who runs a website on his own machine as a hobby, it's a great way to learn about CGI and how this stuff works.

Re:Hmm...

[loraksus]

what's wrong with vi and static pages?

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry I forgot my time machine to go back to when 200 LOCs mattered.

Re:Hmm...

[slumped]

So only programmers should be allowed to blog? I hope that you don't use any other software other than that you wrote yourself. God forbid that you use something written by another programmer. Those are your own DNS and Mail programs, written by yourself, aren't they? Running on your own operating system? And that thing you call CVS probably is your own system with nothing to do with version control.

Do you seriously believe that everyone should write their own software, or did you just want to show off a little?

Re:Hmm...

[metamatic]

Static rendering. No CGI required. You need Perl modules, but only on the machine where you render the pages. Then you just mirror them up to your web host.

Re:Hmm...

[bXTr]

1. You have to have a broadband connection for this to be feasible.
2. Your broadband provider has to allow servers; most do not unless you fork up several hundred dollars a month.
3. Somewhat related to the above, your ISP has to *not block* HTTP ports; most do thanks to Blaster, et al.
4. You have to have enough upstream bandwidth to handle any amount of stress (unless you actually *like* being perpetually slashdotted).

So, unless you have some buds at the cable/telco to hook you up, you're fucked. You'll have to put up with static HTML; enjoy.

Did a blog kill your mom or something?

[katsushiro]

Honestly, the amount of snarky comments along the lines of 'Oh, blogs suck anyway, who cares.', and 'It's all idiotic blabbing anyway.' are getting on my nerves. Really, no one thinks you're one of the cool kids now just because you think blogs are passe. Stop trying to be a post-ironic hipster type who's oh-so-tired of it all. Posting on Slashdot won't get you laid. Neither will having a blog, of course, but that's my point.

I don't understand the level of hostility against blogs. No one's putting a gun to your head and making you read them. I actually support efforts by Google and other search engines to separate blog results from regular webpage results. Sometimes I don't want to have my search results skewed by blogs, and sometimes I really want to know how the 'blogosphere' feels about a particular issue. But while that happens, just ignore them. If you hate them so much, don't read them. But, really, infantile attacks don't make you superior in any way to the bloggers.

I know most blogs are, indeed, just self-centered rambling, or 15 year old girls talking about their latest dream with N'Sync and a pony, but on the other hand, they're valid outlets for a lot of people to just vent, express themselves, and give their opinions on issues. If you don't want to hear those opinions, then just don't visit their blogs. It's that simple.

And yes, I do have a blog of my own, no, I'm not giving out the address here, since it's basically just a self-centered little website that's read by me and maybe 2 friends, and that's fine by me.

Re:Did a blog kill your mom or something?

[xsupergr0verx]

Exactly. I find it's fun at the end of the day to write down what you did, it adds closure and inspires you to do more the next day. Because "I ate Apple Jacks in my boxers, read Slashdot, and built a wall out of pudding cups" is a bit underwhelming, you feel like you have to do something more to justify your existance.

Plus, it is a great repository to tell a story to your friends, the kind like "a funny thing happened on the way to work today" that you don't want to repeat 12 times, just have your pals read them.

Re:Did a blog kill your mom or something?

[Anonymous Coward]

talking about their latest dream with N'Sync and a pony,

OMG i had the same dream last night too
isnt that sooo weird?

ttyl

Re:Did a blog kill your mom or something?

[Dun Malg]

talking about their latest dream with N'Sync and a pony

I have the n'sync-with-a-pony dream all the time. I should start a blog about it.

Re:Did a blog kill your mom or something?

[katsushiro]

Cute, but no cigar. I actually own my own domain, pay for my own webhosting, installed my own weblog software, and manage it myself (with daily backups). I also pay for my own bandwith, which is part of why I feel little need to point the ravening hordes of /. at it. Frankly, it's nothing but a personal sit eof no interest to anyone but me and my friends, full of things like 'LOL, Van Helsing was the worst movie I've seen in ages! You *have* to buy me the DVD!', and 'Oooh, this shiny new gadget came out, I lust after it.'. If you're not allready among the small crowd who stops by there once a week or so to see if I'm still alive, I doubt you'd have any interest in it. Ergo, no linky. I *do* take offense with the people who try to ram their blog down everyone's throats. I don't care about your fluffy kitty, and you don't care about my 'review' of Bubba Ho-Tep, so I don't read your stuff, and you don't read mine. The web's a big place, pick your content. What I take issue with is the attitude many folks cop about blogs, when, really, no one is hijacking your freakin' browser and forcing you to read about what I had for breakfast. And if you do accidentally stumble across it, hey, your browser has all these nifty buttons, like the bookmark list, the back button, even a full address bar! So many ways to escape from the horrible tedium of my rambling! Go for it!

Oh, and just as an aside, yeah, my username's real common, Mr. or Ms. 'geek4ever'. Real smooth of you to notice... say, you ever hear the story about the Pot? Seems he called the Kettle black.

Re:Did a blog kill your mom or something?

[randyest]

Yikes, I hope not:

Some people are complete evil. I just wish sometimes that I had a statement from the lord that i can slay every evil person on earth. Make it a better place. That would be so kool.

That guy is about to snap. Read the rest; it gets worse. And, ominously, the last entry is April 20th, 2004. Urameshia!!!!

Re:Did a blog kill your mom or something?

[Stripes007]

But...Those blogs are screwing with search engine results. That does affect all of us, even those who don't read them. I rather get relevant results for a search topic rather than a bunch of people talking about that topic in their blogs.

Re:Did a blog kill your mom or something?

[Anonymous Coward]

i remember it like it was yesterday. we saw the dust rising on the prarie long before we heard the hoofbeats, and papa got the shotgun down and loaded it with a look of grim determination. i wanted to hug him but mama took me and billy to the back door and ushered us out.

'run,' she said, biting her lip and blinking back tears. 'the blogs are coming... run, and don't ever look back...'

i never saw them again.

Re:Did a blog kill your mom or something?

[M. Silver]

Exactly. I find it's fun at the end of the day to write down what you did, it adds closure and inspires you to do more the next day.

That's exactly why I started keeping a journal of my housekeeping. Given my sig, here seemed an appropriate place, especially since I wasn't publicizing it to anybody I actually knew. I didn't expect any actual people to read it (or even notice it), but a few do. I'm not really sure why.

Re:Did a blog kill your mom or something?

[Anonymous Coward]

snarky comments along the lines of 'Oh, blogs suck anyway, who cares.', and 'It's all idiotic blabbing anyway.'

That's not my biggest problem. I expect people to blab self-indulgent useless crap - that's what people generally DO. But the one thing that really grips my titties is this "blog" shit. For fucks sake, if you keep a journal, call it a journal! Something doesn't need a new goddamn made up half-word just because it's internet accesible.

Re:Did a blog kill your mom or something?

[cheide]

But...Those blogs are screwing with search engine results.

That's a problem for the search engines to deal with. Someone should never have to think to themselves "Oh, should I really be writing this? It might interfere with search engine queries..."

It is a problem though; I keep getting hits on things like monthly archive pages from completely unrelated queries just because the words appeared in two different entries... I often start searches at Google Groups instead since the individual articles will at least be more tightly focused.

Re:Did a blog kill your mom or something?

[CRC'99]

Posting on Slashdot won't get you laid.

DAMN! I thought it was:

1) Post on Slashdot
2) ???
3) Lots of sex.

Back to thr drawing board.

Re:Did a blog kill your mom or something?

[RLiegh]

I have the n'sync-with-a-pony dream all the time. I should start a blog about it.

Does yours also involve the ponies breathing fire and crushing N'Sync under their iron hooves? ;-)

Re:Did a blog kill your mom or something?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't own Jack. You are renting your domain, leasing your web hosting, and using someone else's weblog software. Even your weblog rants are borrowed material...

Re:Did a blog kill your mom or something?

[stephenbooth]

Maybe it's something to do with us doing searches on different subject areas but, I often find that when blog entries show up in my search results they either have the information I need or have links to sites that have the information.

I blog, over on Livejournal, and I freely admit that most of my entries are probably only of interest to myself and my friends. That's part of the reason most of my entries are on 'Friends Only' security setting, therefore they won't show up in search engine results. I know from the comments and the mails I recieve that some entries are ones that people find useful and interesting, those ones have 'Public' security setting so do show up in search engine results.

Stephen

Re:Did a blog kill your mom or something?

[tehcyder]

Bet it's not as interesting as my Britney-Christina-and-a-pony dream.

Re:Did a blog kill your mom or something?

[Aliencow]

We hate blogs because it makes people use fucking retarded words like "Blogosphere" .

Re:Did a blog kill your mom or something?

[Ian Bicking]

I know most blogs are, indeed, just self-centered rambling, or 15 year old girls talking about their latest dream with N'Sync and a pony

Yes, and apparently they are getting in the way of all the people who are looking for relevent information about N'Sync and ponies.

Personally I find the blog search results to be just as relevent as other sources of information, and sometimes one of the only places to get up-to-date information on certain subjects. They also make ranking work in many ways, as they are more likely to link to good content than commercial sites (which incestuously link in a much more manipulative way) -- blogs point to a lot of good content created by individuals, content that wouldn't be highlighted by many other timely sites on the internet.

Apparently some people need to learn how to construct a meaningful query. Use meaningless keywords and you'll get meaningless posts. Search for N'Sync and it's inevitable you'll be pointed to crap. It's just that now, it's not the canonical crap you were used to.

Re:Did a blog kill your mom or something?

[npsimons]

Honestly, the amount of snarky comments along the lines of 'Oh, blogs suck anyway, who cares.', and 'It's all idiotic blabbing anyway.' are getting on my nerves.

Well, you know, you don't have to read them . . .

Really, no one thinks you're one of the cool kids now just because you think blogs are passe. Stop trying to be a post-ironic hipster type who's oh-so-tired of it all.

Maybe we bitch about blogs because we really do honestly think they suck and are a waste of time. Personally, I don't much care what other people think about me, which is a) why I don't have a blog and b) why I feel free to bitch about them even if people don't think I'm cool for it.

No one's putting a gun to your head and making you read them.

Well, hey, no one's putting a gun to your head to make you read the bitching about blogs. No, wait, I will, if you give me half a chance. Where do you live again? Oh shit, I forgot I don't have a gun. Guess you'll have to wait at least five days while I get it cleared.

(the above was sarcasm, and not intended as threat, but really more of a tongue in cheek diatribe against hypocrites such as the one I'm responding to).

Re:Did a blog kill your mom or something?

[advid]

Actually, having a blog did get me laid. I met my now-wife as a result of having one.

This may be a statistical outlier, though...

So, is this the death knell of blogging?

[RLiegh]

Is this mass outage going to make people re-examine the investment of time and energy that they put into their blogs; or will they all simply move to livejournal?

Choice quotes from the wired article

[beforewisdom]

From: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,63856,00. htm

In an audio message posted late Monday explaining his reasons for the shutdown, Winer cited the financial costs of hosting the sites, technical difficulties in moving the blogs to a new server, stress and personal health issues as the reasons for the sudden shutdown.

Winer, who has offered free hosting to bloggers for the past four years, has promised to make exportable copies of blog contents available to the blogs' owners at their request. He says it will take at least two weeks to provide copies of the blogs' contents.

"I just did the best I could," said Winer, in his audio message. "This is not a company here ... this is a person. To expect company-type service ... that's just not going to happen."

The first reaction on reading the news is to assume the guy was being a dick in not giving notice when he saw this coming.

Reading the quotes from the article it may not be that cut and dried.

A single person doesn't donate his work to running a service for 4 years then just drop people for the hell of it.

The quotes above sound like he had other intense stuff going on in his life ......things with a higher priority....that forced him to put off dealing with this in a better manner.

Maybe people wouldn't be angry at him if he mentioned the details of these extenuating circumstances, but then again why should he publish the personal details of his life? I'm sure anyone here can imagine several situations to make a hobby project you run the last thing on your list of priorities: a significant death, loss of a job, being forced to move, 1 or more of other things called "life" etc.

BTW, I only heard the term "blog" within the last 2 years, yet one of the quotes from the article said this guy ran weblog for 4 years.

Is the term "blog" newer then this guy's service?

I used to "blog" before the term and the software. I just updated a personal website I had rather frequently.

Steve

Re:Choice quotes from the wired article

[juuri]

The circumstances really don't really matter. If you choose to run a site with thousands, hell even a dozen users, you treat as though you would treat any professional site you may manage. Not giving any notice whatsoever speaks volumes about the level of respect he had for his users and his level of commitment in general. Obviously this is a decision he has been mulling for some time, would it have been so hard to give weeks of notice? To have closed down public access but allowed users to download their content?

Basically he is just a dick who shouldn't make commitments (even to strangers) that he can't honour in a respectable manner.

Re:Choice quotes from the wired article

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck Wired. They get no respect from me until they deliver on those VR glasses that make toast and give me hummers they promised like 10 years ago.

Suckasses.

Re:Choice quotes from the wired article

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe people wouldn't be angry at him if he mentioned the details of these extenuating circumstances, but then again why should he publish the personal details of his life?

There's a blogging joke here somewhere but I just can't find it, dammit.

Re:Choice quotes from the wired article

[Anonymous Coward]

but then again why should he publish the personal details of his life?

Well, the ones upset are bloggers, after all.

They assume that everyone wants to hear about the banal personal details of their lives, so their expecting him to publish his is only natural.

Re:Choice quotes from the wired article

[beforewisdom]

Exceedingly good point

Re:Choice quotes from the wired article

[beforewisdom]

I agree The situation is just pregnant with possibilities

Re:Choice quotes from the wired article

[Anonymous Coward]

A single person doesn't donate his work to running a service for 4 years then just drop people for the hell of it.

He was the CEO of Userland, the company that offered this service. The Userland company has been split into two parts, and this service is being abandoned. Dave, instead of telling people about this, tried to shift the weblogs onto a substandard server quietly. Mid-move, he realised the server wasn't up to it, and dumped the weblogs he didn't like.

Now all the data is locked up on his server and you have to ask nicely to get it back in a fortnight's time. Dave is in the habit of blowing up at people if he thinks they aren't on his side, so nobody who has data they want back dare raise their voice lest they lose it all.

Dave Winer is not a reasonable man. They may well have been extenuating circumstances, but he's acted like an asshole for years and nobody is willing to give him the benefit of the doubt forever.

Re:Choice quotes from the wired article

[beforewisdom]

What you posted about this person may be true.

You do have a lot of work ahead of you to convince people of it posting from an anonymous nickname with unsubstantiated claims.

Re:Choice quotes from the wired article

[Anonymous Coward]

Which claims don't you believe? Dave will readily admit to everything I've said except being in the habit of blowing up at people and acting like an asshole, of which there is copious evidence provided elsewhere in comments on this story.

Re:Choice quotes from the wired article

[JupiterX]

BTW, I only heard the term "blog" within the last 2 years, yet one of the quotes from the article said this guy ran weblog for 4 years.

Is the term "blog" newer then this guy's service?

I started my first weblog with Pyra's (now Google's) Blogger service in December 1999, and people were certainly calling them "blogs" by then. IIRC Blogger started in spring 1999, but I'm not sure how or if the birth of the Blogger service coincides with the general usage of the term "blog".

Re:Choice quotes from the wired article

[Deep Esophagus]

BTW, I only heard the term "blog" within the last 2 years, yet one of the quotes from the article said this guy ran weblog for 4 years. Is the term "blog" newer then this guy's service?

When I want to see when a term first came into use, I search Usenet archives. In this case, I found that "blog" as a verb goes back to July 1999, and the first reference to blogger.com is August 31, 1999. "Weblog" first appeared in 1996 to refer to - get this - a log of web activity - in mid 1994, but there's only one reference and then frequent usage starting in mid 1995. This may be the first appearance of "weblog" to refer to a web surfer's journal of his cybertravels:

From: Jorn Barger (jorn@mcs.com)
Subject: Lively new webpage
Newsgroups: alt.culture.www, alt.hypertext, comp.ai
Date: 1997/12/23

After talking a lot about Frontier and Scripting News (www.scripting.com), I decided to start my own webpage logging the best stuff I find as I surf, on a daily basis:
http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/weblog.html
This will cover any and everything that interests me, from net culture to politics to literature etc.

Jorn seems to be the only one who used the term in that context until March 1999 (there's one reference to a guy's website with a "new feature: weblogs" in January but I can't tell from the context whether he means that in the traditional sense or editorial sense).

Comment on your sig.

[Anonymous Coward]

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

That depends, If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to see it, does it make a sight?

Re:Comment on your sig.

[Anonymous Coward]

it's not a sig, moron

Re:could it be.. no.

[cbreaker]

3,000 people is nothing compared to a Slashdot flood. The blogs are small. He could have easily shut it down to the general populace, and left it open only to the owners of the existing blogs. It wouldn't have been more traffic then normal.

Yes, it was free. No, you can't do anything about it. And yes, it was still and asshole thing to do.

Another 'free end'

[orangeguru]

Well - we see the collaps of another unsolid business idea of another 'free' service - plus the blunder of another blogging provider (remember the whole SixApart - Movabletype 3 anger last month?)

Health problems...

[ReptileQc]

If you read the Netcraft article, you would have seen that he had problems other than just technical problems. He seems to have health problems too. Maybe that's the real reason why he needed to shut it down. Maybe someone nice with a few gigs to spare would make a nice offer to host the whole thing?

Re:Health problems...

[sakusha]

He had health problems like 3 years ago. Every time he does something that pisses people off (which is quite often) he starts whining about his poor health and how it's unfair to pick on him. It's just one of his bullshit tactics.

Re:Health problems...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll volunteer the two gigs yahoo just gave me!

To all saying users should backup their blogs...

[tlambert]

To all saying users should backup their blogs...

Exactly how are they supposed to do this?

A fundamental weakness in the blog paradigm is that there is CGI software between you and your raw data, in order to impose a style on it. This is particularly true of third party hosting, which provides cookie-cuter blogs through common software, where the only thing that differes from user to user is a few settings and their URL.

Backups usually only make sense if (1) you can get at the raw, preformatted data, and (2) that getting at that data will do you any good -- e.g. you will be able to externalize it the same way somewhere else.

At this point, blog-hosting service providers really don't have standards for their variable data, so even if you had a backup, it really wouldn't get your blog back up on the net, without a lot of work.

-- Terry

It sucks but it happens

[wuice]

I remember the day when my Livejournal had been totally wiped. Emptied. Back to square one. I sat there dumbfounded, what had happened to my months of entries? I'm not the only one I've seen this happen to.. I guess all you can really do is move on. Losing data sucks.. Be more rigorous in backing up next time and hopefully it won't happen again.

I've lost unreplacable data a few times now (sometimes on my machine, sometimes on someone else's servers). I should have learned my lesson sooner. Even if it *shouldn't* happen, it does happen. Sucks facing hard immovable reality sometimes.

Re:It sucks but it happens

[Anonymous Coward]

I've lost unreplacable data a few times now

Not to slam you, but really what's so irreplacable about blog entries? It ain't going to win a Nobel prize soon or solve world hunger.

Course there are some emotional attachments to it, but I think its a good idea to break with the past every so often. Do you really want to be reminded daily of how you felt when your gerbil died?

Re:It sucks but it happens

[wuice]

Well, this is how I *really* dealt with it, at least when it *was* blog entries that I lost.. I shrugged and went "it's just blog entries." However, I did not want to malign (intentionally or unintentionally) anyone who did have such an attachment to their entries, as I did at one point. To me, only the recent ones are interesting.. and I've always blogged to rant, ramble, practice writing, all that crap.

I totally agree with your point, but it may not hold true for everyone.

A suggestion to make things easier

[dumky]

Why not leave the sites online, but with some authentication turned on (Basic HTTP auth)?

This way online the blog authors could access the system and get their data out. The load on the server should stay reasonable.

TANSTAAFL!

[Anonymous Coward]

There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

Re:TANSTAAFL!

[Anonymous Coward]

You seriously work at the wrong burger joint; talk to your manager. pronto.

buyer beware

[markalot]

Simple common sense, IMO.

You get what you pay for, and if its not in writing then you have no rights.

When looking for blogging options I looked at hosted sites and I looked at hosting my own. It was pretty easy to come up with criteris for a good blog, including the ability to back up entries.

Re:buyer beware

[SillyNickName4me]

And so I host it myself ;P

Google this

[Anonymous Coward]

asshole Dave Winer

Money

[PsiPsiStar]

If money and stress were really the problem, why not sell the service to a company and then offer backups. If only a fraction of the people paid up ($15 for a year?) it would have been worth it and fewer people would have gotten pissed.

This guy can do what he wants, but he handled things badly.

Re:Money

[silicon not in the v]

If only a fraction of the people paid up ($15 for a year?) it would have been worth it and fewer people would have gotten pissed.

Ha, I can see the reaction already:
"That's my data! How dare you charge me to get my own data back. U suX0rs!"

Re:Money

[PsiPsiStar]

Well, let them back up their data for free. They would just have to pay to continue with the service. And the company could deal with it instead of this guy. Assuming this happened so suddenly because the guy was on the edge of a nervous breakdown or somthing. I don't know his reasons.

You get what you pay for...

[coene]

... which in this case is... nothing :P

Seriously, why would you leave data on a free hosting service's servers? You can't count on them. If I use a Hotmail or Yahoo email account, I have to understand it could drop off the planet tomorrow.

It takes big ones to complain about a free service.

Re:You get what you pay for...

[LMariachi]

Here, have an apple. No, no, it's free, I don't want any money. Enjoy.

What's that? There was a razor blade in it? Yeah, I know. So what? You must have some big ones to complain about a free apple!

Re:You get what you pay for...

[TiggsPanther]

Seriously, why would you leave data on a free hosting service's servers? You can't count on them. If I use a Hotmail or Yahoo email account, I have to understand it could drop off the planet tomorrow.

Something's very wrong with the world when that's a common attitude.
Whatever happened to common courtesy?

OK, many (though not all) Blogs are worthless to any but the person who writes them. So what? Pulling the plug without warning your users just doesn't seem polite. OK, it looks like there are reasons. But that won't (and shouldn't) stop people getting majorly ticked that something they were using was yanked with no heads-up.

Maybe it's 'cos I work as an IT Support-tech, but I really don't like the idea of basically pulling a service without letting the users know first. Even outside my job something just doesn't sit right about it.

I admit that's a reason why I use paid-for webhosting for my site and email. But that doesn't mean I think it's right that for-free services can be yanked at no notice.

I'm a firm believer in "You get what you paid for", but I also believe that if you volunteer a service you still have some responsibility to it. And a week or so's warning is only fair.

Tiggs

Re:You get what you pay for...

[evilviper]

It takes big ones to complain about a free service.

Oh? So you wouldn't complain if the entire contents of your Yahoo e-mail account were distributed publicly?

Most everything on the web is "free", yet not free. A free website is like free TV, free vacations, free services, etc... You still pay for it, just not out of your wallet.

New Word Coined!

[Rick and Roll]

"ogs" - which refers to all types of online journalism, including:

1. blogs
2. plogs
3. moblogs

Note: I decided not to call them "logs", because that word has already gained use online and offline, so we need a way to distinguish which ones are online.

Re:New Word Coined!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, how about "blogs" instead?

All of your examples (except for "plog," which I've never heard of) start with "blog." :-)

Re:New Word Coined!

[chris_mahan]

ologs.

for online logs

Re:New Word Coined!

[spectral]

plogs were mentioned earlier on slashdot. I don't see the need for a new word for it, but hey, whatever.

Re:New Word Coined!

[Anonymous Coward]

As in "oggs vorbis"?

Re:New Word Coined!

[glowfish]

You need to shorten it.

Try gs.

or maybe just g.

then you'll have apple g5's and g3 cell phones to include in your category too.

Re:New Word Coined!

[Gilmoure]

Pogs are over? Oh man!

Re:To all saying users should backup their blogs..

[abartlett_219]

the LiveJournal package and site offer exports to XML of all posts for a given month. You can also pull out the comments via a different point if that is a necessity, and then just hash them together. You can see the export here.

also, many of the clients that interface with the LJ servers can pull all the posts, comments, and other data.

Wrong.

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

It's as though a couple of thousand babbling idiots were suddenly silenced.

No no, Slashdot is still up. :P

Re:Wrong.

[Zibblsnrt]

That's a couple hundred thousand babbling idiots, though.

-PS

Re:To all saying users should backup their blogs..

[k4_pacific]

How 'bout after each post, go to the blog, then go to file->save as...

It will be HTML, but it could be restored fairly easily by opening the html file in a web browser and copying and pasting into a new blog's post page in another browser window.

It would be inconvenient, but not as hard as you make it out to be.

Anyway, visit my blog. There is a link in the sig. I try to write about interesting things like life on other planets and token-ring adapters rather than just posting the typical masturbatory grousing you find in most other blogs.

Blog backup service.

[Greg@RageNet]

Coincidentally we are launching a blog backup service shortly. We'll back up blogs so that users won't have to worry about their content if their service goes down or *gasp* goes out of business!

Blog Backup Program

-- Greg

Re:Blog backup service.

[SpaceCadetTrav]

If people aren't going to pay to have a blog hosted, what makes you think they'll pay to have them backed up?

Have you ever heard the expression?

[Anonymous Coward]

"You get what you pay for"

What he did was smart..

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of giving plenty of notice so every person would attempt to download their entire blog, and probably cause him a ton of traffic - he announced it out of the blue.

As you can see from the main page, there's roughly only 100 people that have applied to have their blog emailed back to them - I guess the others just can't be bothered. Those 100 are probably the only ones who will actually do anything with their blog.

Everyone can say this guy should have given notice etc, but the fact remains it was a free service. If he didn't offer to send the blogs back to people on request then that would be quite ignorant, but he did offer - something he probably didn't have to do.

Dave Winer

[redtail1]

For those of you with better things to do than follow weblog community matters, Dave Winer is a narcissistic asshole who will do almost anything to get attention including revising history, throwing temper tantrums, slamming other people (but later denying he did it) and taking his ball and going home. He jealously guards technologies he helped create and hinders any efforts to help them grow from pet projects into community standards because he doesn't want to lose the spotlight. Most people who know him have learned to ignore him because complaining about his petulant behavior is pointless.

There. Now you're up to speed.

Re:Dave Winer

[Anonymous Coward]

That's about an accurate, concise summary of Dave Winer as I have ever heard. If this drops below +5 at any point, please mod back up again.

Don't take our words for it, Google "Dave Winer" asshole and read all eight hundred hits.

Re:Dave Winer

[Anonymous Coward]

So this Winer guy never did anything good then? So why are people talking about him?

Oh wait, Winer really gets attention by creating things for people, doesn't he. What did you ever create for 3,000 people, redtail1?

Re:Dave Winer

[Anonymous Coward]

800 people don't make your opinion true, you moron.

Re:Dave Winer

[Anonymous Coward]

Their accounts of his behaviour do though.

Re:Dave Winer

[Anonymous Coward]

So if Linus Torvalds decided to put a trojan in Linux one day, does that mean only people who have written and given away an OS kernel are allowed to criticise him? Get a clue. When you act like an asshole, anybody should be able to call you on it.

Re:Dave Winer

[Some Bitch]

If Winer hadn't been such an asshole with RSS 2.0 and the metaWeblog API he'd be a revered member of the community.

As it is, he's pissed too many people off over the years.

Re:Dave Winer

[redtail1]

Point taken, Anonymous Coward.

Re:Dave Winer

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen!

Thank god someone called a spade a spade.
Winer is a whiner, and has less moral fiber than crack dealer.

A poor little man who needs some Zoloft and therapy.

The canonoization of him by the net community is a joke. Being a cool "netizen" means honesty and politeness (really just respectfulness), both of which Winer lacks. The blog shutdown is just a more public manifestation of it.

And lest you think this is arse talk, my company hired Winer to speak at a meeting.
He proceeded to lambast all big corporations and cry about how he invented SOAP and now everyone is messing it up (imagine if Linus ranted continually about this), and no big companies innovate.

Whoop-dee-effing-doo. Tell us something you didn't say in InternetWeek last year.

He just doesn't get it. Big corps are not expected to innovate - they are expected to make money. Innovation does occur, but moreso in traditional hardware/hard product companies.
Software is rarely innovative, in the true sense of the word, but rather cobbles togther existing things in a useful form; more like a carpenter.

I've been around a whle (maybe too long), and find that rage over blogging is so overhyped it borders on a tulip frenzy. Nothing new here folks, just people posting opinions....been doing that for a long time.

I expect a mod down for grilling the sacred cow; I just can't believe I'm the only one who sees this.

What a tragedy!

[Anonymous Coward]

What on earth will Roland Piquepaille do?! How will he continue selling ad space and submitting his blog to Slashdot if his blog has been shut down?

A choice quote from the Wired article:

[Ayanami Rei]

I just have my fingers crossed that my girlfriend gets her blog back," said software programmer Tom Gortell. "She feels like someone just sucked out her brains. I don't get it, it's just an online journal, right? But she feels like her entire life has been stolen."

And a prediction:

Researchers at University of Washington determine weblogs suck out bloggers souls

Posted by timothy on Wednesday June 16, @12:34AM
from the just-like-cameras dept.

Dedication and Sorrow

[Tojosan]

That's what I heard in his voice. I wasn't a user so I'm not going to say I understand the frustration of the bloggers but I'm just not seeing the need to attack this guy or his efforts.

This is also a loss not to just the bloggers but the scores of folks who read those blogs. TO be honest it sounds like a loss to him also.

Let us give him the benefit of the doubt and wish him well.

Tojo

Re:Dedication and Sorrow

[ky11x]

Who the hell modded this flamebait? Is that particular moderator unable to read? Christ, the parent comment goes out of its way to NOT imply that other people are stupid, that only his interpretation of events is right, that other people's opinions are worthless, etc. -- the hallmarks of true flamebait posts. Read it again. It just expresses his view of the situation, with a specific disclaimer that he does not claim to "understand the frustration of the bloggers." I can only hope this gets fixed in metamoderation

Re:Dedication and Sorrow

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, for your voice of reason you are rewarded with flamebait mods.

Two posts above a rant about what a 'narcissistic asshole' he is gets +5 insightful.

Slashdot has gotten so petty and lame, it's actually pretty funny.

Re:Not any more then normal traffic really..

[Just Some Guy]

they could have shut down the sites but allowed the owners of the blogs to grab the data. It would probably have been less traffic in the few days before shutdown then normal traffic.

These are blogs. The owners are the ones reading them.

Locking out the owners and only allowing guests would probably cut the bandwidth usage by about 95%.

You mean like Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Make up your mind people.
Do you want free software or not?
Luke warm people are weinies.

Is this supposed to make me feel bad?

[davmoo]

This is what happens when you rely totally on a free service and do not keep backups of your own data.

A single tear rolls down my cheek...not.

I feel a disturbance in the force.-Congress.

[Anonymous Coward]

" It's as though a couple of thousand babbling idiots were suddenly silenced."

Congress gets hit by a meteor.

Drudge Report reveals that Lakers are beaten

[Anonymous Coward]

Drudge confirms it, the Lakers have been defeated in 5 games.

It was a free service-Analogies.

[Anonymous Coward]

" The users got what they paid for."

"It's free software. The users got what they paid for."

Re:It was a free service-Analogies.

[winkydink]

Exactly. Still no official 2.4 kernel from kernel.org even after the user-land crash vulnerability posted laat week. If this was MS, there'd be no end of slamming them.

Zombies

[pipingguy]

"She feels like someone just sucked out her brains"

Both male and female (who might be out there...nah, no girls read here) Slashdotters should pay careful attention to the above quote.

Don't we all need more brains?

No Surprises there.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, "enraged" posts and overblown hyperbole ( "The Death of Blogging" one line, and then the next going on about how this Winer person who I have never heard of was the "worst thing to happen to blogging" the next. Indeed. ) from a blogger, and better, a blogger who includes "Loss" as one of the three focused areas in the title of their weblog.

Well, I never. My brief exposure to the blogging community seems to indicate it is full of people who love to whine and kvetch about almost anything, I'm surprised they're not feting this man for giving them a new screed of material for the next few months.

Health issues?!

[YouHaveSnail]

I'm concerned to hear that Dave Winer is suffering from health problems. Whatever you think of him and his various endeavors, Dave has been incredibly influential in the Macintosh software and Internet development communities for about as long as I can remember. Incredibly productive, too. I won't try to list all the stuff he's done, but we've all used the fruits of his labor. And he hasn't filed a single patent for any of it.

So screw the blogs and give Dave a break. If there's anyone out there who has earned a bit of understanding, Dave's the guy.

Speedy recovery to you, Dave.

Re:Health issues?!

[Anonymous Coward]

i never used any of his shit.

Re:Health issues?!

[shri]

The weird part is that after all of these wonderful things (including userland) he cannot find the funding to keep weblogs going. Guess he missed out on the dotcom boom or has no desire to monetize his traffic beyond google adsense.

Re:Health issues?!

[ragnar]

I will second your point about his contributions and all around good guyness, however with so many friends and supporters I would have expected him to find a better solution than pulling the plug. He has run his own company for over 10 years, so I would think he knows a thing or two about monetary forecasting. Obviously we aren't getting the whole story here, but this incident casts a shadow on Winer's stump speech proclaiming that weblogs will revolutionize the media.

Re:Health issues?!

[YouHaveSnail]

Sure you have. He had a hand in XML-RPC, SOAP, RSS, and more. For a long time, Frontier was the glue that integrated many web servers and databases. You may not have bought any products directly from UserLand or THINK, but you've most likely used products that were either influenced by or implemented using his stuff.

Re:To all saying users should backup their blogs..

[Anonymous Coward]

the typical masturbatory grousing

Dude - you have bird porn on your blog?

Those masturbating grouse are really cool man!

freedom of stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

weblogs are gay, giving some whinny nobody a voice; what, do they want to turn the whole world into america or something? what a stupid idea.

Not all good: Lambda the Ultimate

[reflective recursion]

Anyone know if "Lambda the Ultimate" has moved? Only "blog" I cared to read.

Re:Not all good: Lambda the Ultimate

[MarcOiL]

There is a cache here:
http://www.angelfire.com/tx4/cus/lambda.htm l

Truly one of the best blogs out there.

Livejournal Backup..

[swmccracken]

Hrrm.. I imagine that that would have only ever happened as a mistake - never as an unannounced delibrate action. I cannot imagine Brad being as unrepentent and arrogant as Dave here. (Another /.er has said that Dave apparently has quite a reputation for arrogance.)

LJ is a completely different level of outfit - their scale is huge. They also created and released (the open source) memcached, now a standard way of accellerating databases on very heavy traffic'd sites.

Anyway, there is finally a livejournal backup program - downloads your LJ to your local computer.

Re:Livejournal Backup..

[wuice]

Oh, I'm sure it wasn't intentional. I haven't even ruled out the possibility that I (and other people) simply fucked up.. Doesn't change the reality of the situation much.

I am also very happy with Livejournal.. and I'm the type of dude who wrote my own PHP scripts to blog with at one point since I was too anal to use anyone else's because of one small reason or another.

And that LJ backup is a very awesome tool, I'd mod you up if I could. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

Listen to audio notes

[iamacat]

It's much more informative than the web page. The guy basically says he is too sick to maintain the server and will export the blogs on request. For me, it sounds like people should either a) say thanks for a freeby they had for a while, export their stuff and move on or b) offer to host all or a portion of the sites and provide a legal privacy guarantee for moving the accounts.

Something that slashdot owners should consider, huh?

Re:Listen to audio notes

[Anonymous Coward]

Winer is not willing to provide anything from before July 2003, though (last I heard). That kind of puts a crimp in things for a lot of people.

If he is that sick, maybe he should have asked for some assistance from the bloggers? Any way you slice it, there are many better ways out of this problem than shutting off the lights for 3000 blogs.

Re:To all saying users should backup their blogs..

[mrjackson2000]

i belive their also working on a backup of everything in 1 file, probly XML or SQL

The good news is

[Scud]

That Google hits should be more relevant.

Why should it be even that complex?

[lingqi]

I honestly cannot imagine what profound thing one have to say in a blog that full HTML style markups are necessary. After all, a blog is a primarily *verbal* medium of communication, and books have done perfectly well as plain text for thousands of years - Reading the ASCII version of shakespeare won't diminish any of his glory, but instead should amplify upon it as an example of mastery of the language and expression. And I can only imagine what did people do without HTML / XML to markup the bible / Koran / teachings of Budda.

If you want to get fancy, put in symbols that you absolutely need by using UTF-8 (sadly some blogs *ahem*slashdot*ahem* don't support this), and you should be alright until the end of time as far as backing up easily, editing easily, and near-universal portability.

Re:To all saying users should backup their blogs..

[RedWizzard]

How 'bout after each post, go to the blog, then go to file->save as...

And the comments? Are you suggesting that people should go back and resave their posts every time someone makes a comment?

I set up this server...

[jerkychew]

If it's still in the same rack as it was 6 months ago, that is. I used to work for a web hosting company that had some co-lo space in a hosting facility. We set up 2 of the servers for weblogs.com as well as another server for another site. I never met Dave, but did everything through his partner. His partner was a super-nice guy, Linux afficianado, and slashdot reader. Kinda sad that they ran out of money.

(I have to be a bit vague on the details due to NDAs and such... Sorry for not including any specifics)

wrong

[That's Unpossible!]

I don't understand the level of hostility against blogs. No one's putting a gun to your head and making you read them.

Apparantly you haven't tried to use Google lately.

Re:wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

However, why should people have to change how they use the internet? If blogs really are disrupting Google search results, then shouldn't it be the service provider (i.e. google) that adapts to how the internet is being used?

Re:wrong

[That's Unpossible!]

However, why should people have to change how they use the internet?

They shouldn't.

If blogs really are disrupting Google search results, then shouldn't it be the service provider (i.e. google) that adapts to how the internet is being used?

Yes. However I wasn't saying people should stop blogging, I was explaining one big reason why people I know are bloghaters right now.

Whoa, that reminds me!

[hellfire]

It took a whiny loser bringing down 3000 web logs to remind me to back up my own! I hadn't backed mine up in months. What funny karma....

Re:Whoa, that reminds me!

[Grrr]

Alright!
Heh.

(Me, too. Not a blog, but after harping about backups here I've gotta go burn some additional copies of stuff...)

So something good did come out of this /. story...

<grrr>

Re:To all saying users should backup their blogs..

[drinkypoo]

As a companion to the sibling posts - when you write the text in the blog, copy and paste it into a text file. Original formatted text. Done. How hard was that?

bloging...

[eriksarcade]

is just degauassing your own coil anyways... (uf reference) (forgive my spelling...)

Googlecache=blog backup

[robogun]

And don't forget the wayback machine.

ModBlog

[Matrix9180]

ModBlog is a great site if you need somewhere to move your stuff!
Yes, my opinion is slightly biased ;)

Manila supports backup

[Wesley Felter]

Manila (the software used on weblogs.com) has an export feature for exactly this purpose. (I just backed up my site right now. Luckily it wasn't on weblogs.com.)

Dave Winer has written in the past about why it's import for Web apps to export data: "So since we're going to have competition, I believe we must take extra steps to guarantee that there's no customer lock-in. It's even more important in the age of the Web when the user might not even have a copy of their own data. One of the cardinal requirements of this market, even before we try to get the UIs compatible, is an export function that leaves un-rendered text and data on the user's hard disk in a format readable by software that's available at a reasonable or no cost."

Re:Manila supports backup

[Argyle]

Yes, it has the feature.

Too bad Winer didn't have the courtesy to let the users use it.

There is no excuse for his behavior or attitude in this matter.

Re:Manila supports backup

[rocketjesus]

Manila had that feature, but the users of weblogs.com didn't have access to that feature.

RE: knowing in advance

[King_TJ]

It seems pretty obvious to me that, yes, this guy DID know in advance that he was having some difficulties. But I can still sympathize with him. I ran a BBS for almost 10 years straight, and as it grew in popularity, more and more people simply took it for granted. It's just human nature to get used to a free service and eventually just *expect* the person running it to keep on giving it away indefinitely (and heck, why not make some demands for changes and improvements too!).

By contrast, the longer you run a service like this, the less exciting it is for you. After a while, it really just seems like another chore you'd rather not do (like cutting the grass or washing the dishes).

It sounds to me like the guy just got burnt out on the whole thing, and probably felt like he wasn't really getting any personal benefit from providing the free service anymore. Why should he "owe" anyone advance notice, when surely doing so would just mean a flood of emails from people begging him to keep it online, offers of small payments that wouldn't really help in the long run anyway, and requests that he invest even MORE of his time in trying to transfer the whole thing over to some other party?

Asshole!

[Anonymous Coward]

What sort of cock does something like that!?

I hope all those bloggers get a refund.

first avagadro, now userland

[goon]

reading a fellow perl monger's log over at use.perl.org how Advogato suddenly dropped of the earth, now winer.

blogs aren't for free ... so I'm not supprised. but it does raise the question why users cannot set up/mirror blogs on their own domains?

Winer's Lying: backups would have been easy

[sakusha]

Winer argued that it would have been impossible to perform backups, it would have overwhelmed the system if he'd preannounced the closure, it would have killed his system from overload.

I call Bullshit.

Notice this handy feature on the Harvard weblog host site created by Winer:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/weblogBackup

You just submit the request, and your backup runs overnight, presumably it's a cron job to tar all your files (or the Windoze equivalent, since Winer seems stuck on Windoze platform).

So Winer was lying when he said it would have been impossible to offer backups without shutting down the whole system like he did. Software was already written to perform backups. He could have just made the blog webspaces read-only, so blog authors could no longer post new content, but the blogs could still be available to the public, until they got backed up. This transition was handled extremely poorly, it must have been a deliberate decision to do it this way. Dave apparently WANTED to piss everyone off.

Re:Winer's Lying: backups would have been easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the new server collapsed under the traffic of 3,000 weblogs, making it impossible to serve Web traffic and perform backups at the same time.

There are no paid accounts

[Wesley Felter]

Dave Winer says "I don't want to start a site hosting business." As far as I can tell, there is no way to "upgrade" to keep a weblogs.com site; the best you could do is move to a different provider.

[OT] Your sig...

[NuclearDog]

# perl -e 'use MIME::Base64;print decode_base64 "TGUgVGVtcHMgRGV0cnVpdCBUb3V0"'
Le Temps Detruit Tout

AltaVista & Google both translate into 'Detruit Time All' (French, right?) May I ask what it really means?

Heh, this is kind of like a game on Slashdot. Decode the sig...

ND

Re:[OT] Your sig...

[Anonymous Coward]

AltaVista & Google both translate into 'Detruit Time All' (French, right?) May I ask what it really means?

DEEEEtroit!! PIstons!!!!

My vote is that it's a reference to the NBA 2004 champions, but that's b/c i pay attention to something in the world other than linux.

Re:[OT] Your sig...

[Hrshgn]

>Le Temps Detruit Tout

"Time destroys everything"

Re:[OT] Your sig...

[stridebird]

perl -MMIME::Base64 -e 'print decode_base64 "dGhpcyBlbmNvZGluZyBpcyBiZXR0ZXIgY296IGl0IGVuZHMgd 2l0aCBhIGNhcnJpYWdlIHJldHVybgo="'

Re:[OT] Your sig...

[ezzzD55J]

You run sigs as root eh? Well then I have a sig to sell you ;)

Re:[OT] Your sig...

[NuclearDog]

Yeah, yeah, I know it's poor security practice... blah blah blah...

Disproportionate much?

[Complicity]

From the 'enraged' link:

Last night was a 9/11 of sorts for the weblogs.com bloggers.

Or entirely not like that at all.

Re:Disproportionate much?

[Anonymous Coward]

For fucks sake, does nobody understand the concept of a metaphor?

Before this happened, nobody would have expected Dave to simply nuke 3000 weblogs with zero notice. Then along comes one asshole and a chunk of the web just disappears.

Nobody is saying it's as meaningful or important as 9/11. They are just drawing a parallel, trying to make people how significant it is *in context*. In the context of blogging, it's a big deal. A lot of voices have been silenced and nobody will feel secure with their hosting services as much. Of *course* in the context of day-to-day life it isn't anything like 9/11. That's not what metaphors are trying to get across.

Re:Disproportionate much?

[BumbaCLot]

Try to compare it to the Death Star blowing up. Virtual people being silenced. Did we ever see anyone from Alderan in the first place? 9/11 is overboard. People can post their crap in another place, they aren't dead.

hell, Ill host them...

[dallask]

I have an unlimited amount of storage and bandwidth....

Contact me, Ill host it...

info@gyrogliderentals.com

Why we hate blogs

[SmallFurryCreature]

The web is a wonderfull things in wich countless bits of information are there to be found. Except it is getting harder and harder to find them. I can easily mentally filter out the fake link sites from google results. Porn is easy too. Shopping sites I learned to regonize and avoid as well. But blogs are harder because there are so many of them and the sentences shown by google actually seem to relate to the subject I am searching for.

Personal pages with no content of intrest to anyone have been around since the early days of the web. However they existed in their own little corner and were rarely found by search engines. Blogs because of the incestious linking to each other are found and are just another chunk of noise getting in the way.

Not that I hate blogs. It is just, ugh. I thought I found the information I wanted and instead I am on some whiners site. What a waste of time and bandwidth.

Now if only google could filter out blogs. Then all the personal sites would go back to their own little corner of the net and I wouldn't know anything about them. Of course if this is done then a lot of bloggers would whine because they would miss the accidental visits and see that in reality nobody wants to read about their thoughts. You gotta be intrestting to have something intrestting to say and most people simply are not.

Re:Why we hate blogs

[Rick and Roll]

vi VS emacs arguments are pointless and a waste of time.

vi is the best.

Amen to that, bro.

Re:Why we hate blogs

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, when I search for stuff, I get a load of blogs in the results too. But the difference between me and you is that instead of going "ugh a blog, I hate blogs", I click on the link, and lo and behold, it's actually talking about the topic I'm researching. Google doesn't pick out blogs and randomly throw them into search results you know, they do have to be ranked under the keywods you search for.

Re:Why we hate blogs

[katsushiro]

I actually agree with you on this. On my original post I said I supported efforts by Google to filter blog results, after all. The thing is, blogs *can* be a valid source of information. I actually get a decent amount of my tech news from this blog-like site, you might have heard of it, Slashdot? :)

My point is, sometimes you *want* to know what's being written in blogs about Subject X.. and sometimes you don't. I agree that it would be nice for Google to have a 'Weblogs' tab that you could turn on and off. As for the people who would whine, hey, let 'em. That's part of what blogs are for, to whine to your heart's content. If the 'Blog Tab' is turned on in Google, you won't have to hear their whining anyway.

As for the 'incestious linking', I really don't see the problem with it.. Some of the best blogs out there are actually riddled with hyperlinks to a plethora of resources about whatever they're talking about, be they other blogs or regular pages. That's fine. Hell, that's freakin' *great*. It's exactly *why* the Web was designed with hyperlinking in mind. So that as you write you could link any part of your text to additional or related information elswhere in the web. It's not the blog writer's fault for doing exactly what the web protocols allow them to do. If doing this skews search results on a search engine like google because of the algorithm Google chose to rank their webpages, then it's Google's choice and responsibility to adapt to it and either change their algorithm or filter out the 'offending' sites.

Whether you like them or not, blogs are a fairly natural outgrowth of the Net's capabilities. As many here often say about any changes that affect other companies: adapt or die. Find a way to filter blogs from search results, and provide that option to those users who want it, or wait until someone else does it and watch them get your users.

Re:Why we hate blogs

[N0decam]

Why, it would be great if you could add something like "-blog" to your search terms and eliminate 99% of the blogs out there.

I fall in the camp that would rather sort through blog links in google than page after page of links to shopping sites. A good blog link will link directly to further sources of information, often ones that wouldn't have shown up with my particular search terms.

For those times that I really don't want to see any blogs in the results, "-blog" is usually enough to get rid of them.

Re:Why we hate blogs

[ezthrust]

I have often found just the right bit of information because of blogs. Often from the phrases that are on the Google search I can discern that the blogger is indeed looking for or has found a solution to the same problem I am looking for.

In my blog's referring stats I often see search results that look like they are leading people that are looking for information that I cannot give them. This invariably involves search terms that contain an album name, or movie title and "Torrent" or "Download" This is because I blog reviews of movies and albums.

What kind of idiot searches for movie and music downloads via Google anyways?

When you can't speak in public, please type it!

[Augusto]

His reason for putting this in audio was that he believes nobody reads "essays" and that this is a better way to convey and explain this type of idea/message.

Ironically, he has so many "huh ... hum ... hum ... huh ... and huh ... so ... huh ..." in there that this is not the case and we would all have been better off if he just wrote it. He also sounds pretty bored. Dave, please type it next time!

Mom, 54, bored to death by blogging

[Zhe Mappel]

I know most blogs are, indeed, just self-centered rambling, or 15 year old girls talking about their latest dream with N'Sync and a pony

That's an unnecessary "or."

Re:Mom, 54, bored to death by blogging

[vranash]

The 'r' was really more of a mistyped 'f' ;p

http://www.blog-city.com

[donsaklad]

It appears the best and easiest templates for weblogs are at
http://www.blog-city.com

See also
http://GuideToProblematicalLibraryUse.library-blog s.net
http://www.library-blogs.net

Blogging is dead?

[Texas Consultant]

I think the corporate takeover is just beginning. In the meantime, old nethands are I think getting more cynical about this: are blogs anything but a forum for self-image in the weird, slightly sick style that virtual identity fosters? It's like being a drama student in high school. You shout your thoughts to the world and then dress them up "artily" so you sound "unique." What yucky culture.

Re:To all saying users should backup their blogs..

[/dev/trash]

Do what I do. Write it in KEdit.

.. use a real tool.

[swmccracken]

Be realistic. You have exactly twelve posts in your LJ. (k4_pacific, right?)

I have one thousand three hundred and fifty six. Are you *still serious*? Besides, the save-as would include all the layout / navigation guff as well as the entry content.

Anyway, there's a better option. There now exists a real livejournal backup tool. (And, it allows you to search the entire contents of your LJ. When your LJ spans several years, that's rather useful.)

It's supposed to grab the comments too, but I'm not one hundred perecent sure about that feature's relability.

Re:.. use a real tool.

[WIAKywbfatw]

Presumably all those 1,356 entries are in a unique portion of the website that's hosting them.

If that's the case then using an offline reader to save all those files locally can be easily done with a few simple clicks. Furthermore, it can also be automated, so that the process is repeated at regular intervals without any user intervention.

So, how easy is that?

Re:.. use a real tool.

[Grrr]

With your level of expertise and the number of posts, you dealt with the backup issue. If others didn't, whose fault is that?
Maybe the ability to back up posts is a deciding factor when selecting a free weblogging service - and if not, the user's own priorities set the stage for later grief.
A failure to plan ahead is not the fault of the free service provider, is it?)

(And yeah, as a last resort, if those 1,356 posts are important enough to you, you might brew a pot of coffee and 'File - Save As' the night away, capturing copies of them... but even that could be avoided up front by choosing a vendor wisely, and actually testing the backup/restore function before it was needed.

<grrr>

That is presuming the server was still working

[SmallFurryCreature]

There are no details so hard to guess. Maybe the machine was in the last stages of its live?

Basically a service provided by a single person for free at his own considerable cost has been withdrawn without notice but with an option to get in a mere two weeks time a backup if you ask in a simple polite way.

Mmmm, not exactly a sign of the apocalypse.

There may be a whole lot of reasons he has decided to quit. He is old enough to have been diagnosed with cancer. Maybe someone close died. Maybe he developed an ulcer who knows.

Everyone seems to have been promised a backup. So quit whining, live for 2 weeks without data nobody but you cares about and then find someone else to provide you with free hosting.

Oh and do backups. How? blogs are simple text entries. Copy and paste to a notepad file. Save-as the finished page. Nothing that couldn't be done by even the most inept user. But of course nobody does backups until it is too late. Bloggers are hardly the exception in this sadly. You do backup don't you?

Umm...Gnome.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm not saying he doesn't deserve some criticism. If you listen to his audio blog, you'll get the clear impression that he's tired of trying to help people who act as hyper-critical (about free stuff!) as some of our Slashdot posters."

Like Gnome.

you too?

[akincisor]

maybe we should start a group :-)

Wow, that was insightful.

[Anonymous Coward]

While I don't doubt that all of the above may very well be (and probably is) true, the fact that people would mod you up without offering any proof whatsoever speaks volumes about the moderation system.

Re:Wow, that was insightful.

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you ever consider the people modding this post up are already aware of Dave's past behaviour?

WTF OMG LOL!

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL!

I didn't notice either

[ocularDeathRay]

HEADLINE: Hosting Service Closes 3000 Blogs Without Notice

you know, I think there is a hidden meaning in this headline.

Run your own! It's that simple!

[shrewmy]

No, really. I bought a computer for $110 from Computer Renaisance that runs linux with no problem. Installing apache with perl was nothing using apt-get, and Greymatter took probably like an hour to get working. And that was my first time ever doing anything outside of "THIS IS MY COOL HOMEPAGE! THIS IS A TREE (picture of a tree) IF YOU CLICK IT YOU CAN EMAIL ME!!!" websites really. And most of the bloggers are ultra cool anti-microsoft people aren't they?

And if you have a blog thats popular enough for you to get enough traffic for your cable provider to get mad, wouldn't you already be on a paid host anyway?

Someone's got to say it...

[sirReal.83.]

Hosting Service Closes 3000 Blogs Without Notice

You're damn right no one noticed...

... Zing!

Yes, blogs do have their uses - say, group collaboration. FLOSS. But there are a fascinating number of them that are just self-important rant-books with no real direction.

Re:Someone's got to say it...

[evilviper]

there are a fascinating number of them that are just self-important rant-books with no real direction.

Well, the idiots had to go somewhere, didn't they? Blogs seem to have taken the place of terribly designed free websites, with nothing but personal information on the author, who managed to struggle through the painstaking process of clicking a few buttons...

Frankly, I like blogs more than the alternative... We don't want the Homer Simpsons out there creating more crapy webpages.

Re:Someone's got to say it...

[sharkey]

Yes, blogs do have their uses - say, group collaboration. FLOSS.

Geez, talk about co-dependance issues. Just buy the dang book. You can do it all by yourself!

We should only be so lucky!

[Anonymous Coward]

Blogging has got to be the silliest exercise in self-aggrandizement and ego-tripping to come out of the Internet yet. The quality of the writing demonstrates that the ability to lucidly express one's self is dramatically lacking, and the caliber of most individuals life experiences are so abysmally boring as to provide bulk cures for insomnia at football stadium distances. They are, for the most part, the most amateurish and infantile writings possible to conceive and demonstrate, as graphically as critics of modern educational methods could desire, the horrendous decline in critical thinking and basic English language skills which our public educational system have caused. The authors of these insipid diatribes may be sorely vexed that they will no longer be able to inflict their puerile existence on the world, but I for one am ready to vote this Winer gentleman a medal for his selfless act of salvation of humanities collective sanity. Bravo Mr. Winer, bravo!

Fond Farewell

[Dagum]

to a bunch of people's brainless, aimless, mindless ramblings.

Sure, there might well be a pearl of wisdom per gigabyte, but BLOG's are primarily for the poster's gratification.

Such things are just as well kept in a private journal.

Whoop-dee-doo.

Re:To all saying users should backup their blogs..

[Quantum Jim]

You don't need fancy software to write in a blog. Jeffery Zeldman used to write his blog exclusively in a text editor, in fact! I think Tim Bray and Norman Walsh use still use Emacs to do the majority of their writing (augmented with some client-side scripts) before uploading their content, but I may be wrong.

Truely Funny thing is...

[WindBourne]

that this happened 3 years ago when a number of .coms died and sold off users data. Now, we have a number of ppl trusting site owners to not run with info and being burned.

I wonder how many of these same ppl will be still be bitching about it when MSN/AOL/Google sells all their data.

Too bad that the age of personal responsibility is gone.

Geeze

[bruns]

Geeze, how can anyone bitch and moan about something they got for completely free?

If you paid for the service, I could see being upset, but be realistic. You get what you pay for.

And as such, because you paid nothing for the blogging service, the person hosting it owes you nothing.

Archive old entries

[SKPhoton]

If you use LiveJournal, there is a command-line based client called Charm and one of its features is the ability to archive old posts.

If you're worried about losing all your old posts, go ahead and back them up yourself. You never know..

Common courtesy?

[jcr]

RTFA. He's giving the users the chance to copy their stuff off his servers.

-jcr

Re:Common courtesy?

[golgotha007]

you RTFA.

he's basically saying that sometime after July 1, when he's moved and settled in and he gets around to it, he will make them available. that doesn't exactly sound like any kind of reassurance.

i don't see why he just doesn't do a huge database dump, compress the hell out of it and make the whole thing available to anyone who wants to download it.

i see people all the time using public or free internet services for things like finance management and blogs. i'm always telling them that one day these services will disappear, and when it happens they're going to lose all their data.

i know that i want my blog to be with me until i die. therefore, i decided to write my own and host it on my own machine. i decided to keep the blog data raw as hell in the database, so it will make for easy exporting years down the road when everything changes.

Re:Common courtesy?

[jcr]

he's basically saying that sometime after July 1, when he's moved and settled in and he gets around to it, he will make them available. that doesn't exactly sound like any kind of reassurance. ..which is more than he has any obligation to do, I might point out.

He was giving people something for nothing, and you're getting all indignant because he's decided to quit. Get over yourself.

-jcr

Re:Common courtesy?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a bit wierd to be ``indignant'', but if I tell my friend he can stay at my house for the night, it's really rude of me to wake him up at 3 in the morning and tell him to get out, because heck, it's my house.

Re:Common courtesy?

[jcr]

Interesting analogy, but it has nothing to do with the question at hand.

-jcr

Re:Common courtesy?

[golgotha007]

He was giving people something for nothing

i am sure all those advertisement dollars probably didn't amount to much, either. m not saying that he's obligated at all.

what i'm saying is that you if you're going to do something, at least follow thru and don't be a cop out. if you're going to cop out, and your actions will end up hurting people, the least you could do is make some kind of announcement a few weeks before deciding to cop out.

there's nothing wrong with having a little common courtesy and basic respect.
let me guess, jcr: are you the guy that honks his horn in some neighborhood for his friend to come out at 3AM? are you that guy that sees a long line and looks for some opportunity to cut it? are you that guy that might see some old person fall down and, instead of helping you chuckle to yourself?

because your reponse to me makes you look like that guy....

Re:Common courtesy?

[jcr]

Funny, but where I come from, common courtesy would dictate that the people that got the free ride for their blogs would thank him, not bitch him out for having the audacity to not give them something for nothing in perpetuity.

As for chuckling to myself, I laugh at people who get all indignant when their infantile sense of entitlement goes unsatisfied, not at people who suffer an accident such as the old person you mention in your ad hominem.

Your post above, FWIW, reminds me of kids I see throwing tantrums in public, with their parents trying to bribe them to behave.

-jcr

Re:Common courtesy?

[golgotha007]

thanks for your post; you just proved my point.

You get what you pay for...

[Anonymous Coward]

oh wait, it was a free service? Well, you should expect it to be around forever out of the goodness of the creator's heart then.

Honestly, if it's important, pay to host it yourself and back it up.

New URLs Suck

[gbulmash]

So say someone has backed up everything and moves it somewhere else, how do their readers find them? More to the point, how do they find their readers??

March 1997, one of my little weekly columns (didn't call them "blogs" back then) gets a mention in Us. Unfortunately I'd been hosting it in donated /~username space, and right after the magazine puts the blurb to bed, the owners of the bookstore hosting my site decide they don't want to run a server anymore.

No warning, no forwarding, no nothing. I have everything backed up, so I register a domain, get hosting, and my site's back online within a few days... only at another address. I'm running around trying to update my entries at all the major search engines, posting to appropriate newsgroups, just trying to get the word out that my columns had moved.

Then Us comes out, glowing little blurb recommending my column... and the *old* URL. My first major national press and no one can find me.

That is the most insidious part of what Winer has done. He has separated all those bloggers from their readers, leaving them no way to leave a forwarding address. Anyone who doesn't backup their content takes their chances, but how do you backup your audience?

- Greg

Re:New URLs Suck

[MsRee]

Which is why redirect URLs are handy, especially for cheapskates like me. I host my website on various free services, but I've kept the same CJB.net URL for some time now. That's what I link to, that's where people go even if I move to another domain (so long as I update the forwarding, of course).

Re:New URLs Suck

[djmurdoch]

Which is why redirect URLs are handy, especially for cheapskates like me. I host my website on various free services, but I've kept the same CJB.net URL for some time now. That's what I link to, that's where people go even if I move to another domain (so long as I update the forwarding, of course).

So you're protected from one of your free web hosts from shutting down, because you use a free redirection service to get to them?? What happens when CJB.net closes shop?

You should register a domain. Then you're safe until some big company decides to challenge you for it.

Re:New URLs Suck

[gbulmash]

You should register a domain. Then you're safe until some big company decides to challenge you for it.

When my host bailed on me without warning, I registered my last name as a domain. I've had it for over 7 years, changed hosts 3 or 4 times, but my e-mail always gets to me, my homepage is always at the same URL.

But there is a caveat. Domain ownership can be addictive. I currently own 16 domains.

Re:New URLs Suck

[radish]

So buy a domain. It costs $10. If you really won't shell that out to make your insightful comment available to the world, then I guess it's not that important to you after all.

Re:New URLs Suck

[MsRee]

For me, my own domain wouldn't solve anything. I'd forget to pay to keep it another year (or not have money on hand when the bill came due) and it would fall to a domain harvester. At least with CJB.net I know if I don't pay for fifteen months, I can still keep my address. Perfect solution? Of course not -- but I trust CJB.net a hell of a lot more than I trust Dave W(h)iner.

Re:New URLs Suck

[djmurdoch]

I still think you're making a mistake. If CJB.net goes out of business, what have you got?
Domain names are pretty cheap (around $10-$15 per year), you can prepay for up to 10 years, and they'll be around at least as long as CJB.net.

Don't trust a free service like weblogs.com, but don't trust a small commercial service either.

You probably can't trust ICANN to act in your best interest, but you can probably trust them or their descendant to leave your name in basically the same form.

What you pay is what you get...

[mseeger]

Hi,

i'm always wondering when people complain about a free service shutting down. If i ain't paying, i cannot expect anything in return: neither a continuation nor a message on the impending shutdown. I agree a short notice would've been nice, but there is no obligation.

Regards, Martin

Re:What you pay is what you get...

[oogoody]

I don't think it was exactly free.
Dave was trying to promote weblogs
for profit so it was in his best interest to
start the market.

How he handled it was bad, but i'm guessing
the pressure got to much and he just wanted
the ties cut. Understandable.

Are you a weblogs.com refugee? See f2o.org

[SteamedPenguin]

Well, just like after MoveableHype came out with the license from hell I wrote the WordPress on freedom2operate tutorial and helped f2o welcome MT switchers. Now that weblogs.com is screwing people over I'd like to mention that Manila and weblogs.com refugees are welcome to make a switch to f2o. You don't have to use WordPress, but the tutorial makes it too easy to pass up.

Ha

[Anonymous Coward]

blogs are gay anyway. A bunch of blow hards who think that other people actually give a sh*t about what they have to say.

Who gives a flying fuck ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, you should all get a life, or a girlfriend or something.
Who gives a flying fuck about it ? It was a free service, it's gone. BFD.

Blogging is for kids.

Here's The Bottom Line, Morons

[Master of Transhuman]

Winer offered to host this stuff for free. He OFFERED (and to be fair, actually did it.)

People took him up on it (braindead though that might be since it should have been obvious to him and them it couldn't go on forever.)

Then he shuts it down WITH NO PRIOR NOTICE.

At best, that makes him an asshole (unless it was literally an emergency that prevented him from notifying anyone at all. Was that the case? Doesn't say so.) At worst, it makes him a major asshole.

Now the morons on /. can self-righteously complain that the people pissed off are "just whiners" - which makes the morons on /. "just whiners" by the same logic - they're whining about someone else's perfectly justified behavior.

Bottom line: You get what you pay for (sometimes) - and you never get what you don't pay for (usually).

Which doesn't justify being an asshole - always.

Being right justifies being an asshole - as I demonstrate here.

Re:Here's The Bottom Line, Morons

[greg_barton]

Being right justifies being an asshole - as I demonstrate here.

Amendment: Thinking you're right justifies the rationalization behind being an asshole - as you demonstrate here.

enraged is fugly

[Anonymous Coward]

Boy that girl at the enraged URL is sure fugly.

Maybe it's just a bad picture.

But I don't think so.

Re:enraged is fugly

[MrPink2U]

...a face for radio!

From Doc Searls's blog

[tunah]

That last point is a critical one that we shouldn't forget, no matter who we are or how we publish on the Web. I've said before that nobody owns anything on the Web. The fact is, we're all renters here. That means our sites, our blogs, our businesses, live in a commercial marketplace. Our Web presences live at the grace of the companies on which we depend. Companies change, and so do the people that comprise them.

Seems to be a little revisionism here: the corporations built the internet, regular people can tag along as long as their efforts are profitable? Did I miss the memo?

so...

[glwtta]

A good start, basically?

or Yahoo Mail, or anything else free

[SuperKendall]

It's pretty easy to place any of the free services in my mind in place of this blogger thing and imagine the same thing happening.

If something is free, I don't assume it will be there for long. Even if something is for pay I don't necessarily trust they will be around forever.

That's why I pay for a mail redirection service, and also pay a separate yearly fee for a mail provider that is not my ISP or a free provider (to minimise likleyhood of having to change email addresses, hopefully to just once a decade at worst). I store all my mail locally as well and back it up pretty often. That's because I place high value on my mail and being able to get to it. Anything I care about I make sure lives on at least two physical drives that I own, in addition to wherever else it might be (like offsite backup - that really is a good idea for everyone!!!)

If I had a project on SourceForge that wasn't throwaway, the first order of business is a daily cron that backs up the whole CVS tree.

And prays to heaven every night...

[SuperKendall]

Offsite backups. Talk about difficult to restore though!

The funny thing about that to me...

[SuperKendall]

That seems to be a pretty common opinion of Dave. yet countless people decided it was a good idea to host their blog on a site operated by what would seem to be, by accounts like this, a madman!! Why on earth would you not expect your blog to just vanish someday, or have your words of wisdom turned into latin or something? Why would you host a blog there at all?

If the answer starts with "well, it was free..." then you get everything you deserve. I have plenty of my own "Well, it was {free,cheap}" experiences and although I grumbled about it a little in the end I could only blame my own human nature for trying to get something for nothing.

Re:The funny thing about that to me...

[metamatic]

In fact, if you look back through Google history a bit, you'll see that Dave gave his weblog software Manila away for free for a year or two, then suddenly jacked the price up to $899 a year subscription fee. That change was without notice too. So it's not like he hasn't pulled this kind of shit before.

Re:The funny thing about that to me...

[radish]

So what? He wrote it, that's his right. You got it free for 2 years - what are you complaining about?

Re:The funny thing about that to me...

[Anonymous Coward]

He wrote it, that's his right.

You are correct. Everybody has the right to act like an asshole. It doesn't mean people don't have the right to criticise him for acting like an asshole though.

My guess at what happened

[0x0d0a]

So, as far as I can tell from the discussion, he tried running stuff on his own server for a bit instead of Userland. I'm going to guess that his bandwidth usage for this month exceeded whatever he purchased for the month -- this would explain why he's refusing to provide any access until the first of next month, when he's sending people's blogs back to them.

Of course, that doesn't explain why he'd use an audio message to get the word out.

Re:My guess at what happened

[Safety Cap]

Of course, that doesn't explain why he'd use an audio message to get the word out.

He explains in his audio that 'people don't read long essays', implying that they'll listen to some guy rambling on about his life story, insterspaced with coughs and---woe is me!---sniffles. Poor Dave, he obviously doesn't understand people (quick show of hands: which is faster to go through, email or voicemail? I thought so.)

If he had only written down his thoughts, then I would have bothered reading them, instead of cutting off his cute diatribe after a few minutes. I can read much faster than he can say "um, ... well, ... um ... "

Re:My guess at what happened

[abulafia]

Of course, that doesn't explain why he'd use an audio message to get the word out.

Keeps it out of search engines, makes it harder to quote and point-by-point reply?

Come on

[SuperKendall]

I notice you posted that AC. Is that because you can't really put belief in your own words?

I don't care how much you try to explain the quote away as "metaphor", it's simply not appropriate to craft a metaphor for information loss from real people dying, especially in large numbers in a tragic manner. That's just plain rude and shows a lack of respect for those dead and the families still here. I imagine you could call up one of the "silenced" bloggers on the phone or even find some of them blogging elsewher eon the same day. Compare and contrast with a wife or child or husband who will never see a loved one again. Oh, you can't.

Re:Come on

[BenjyD]

Come down off that bloody high horse. People use terrible things as metaphors - does saying "That was his Waterloo" show lack of respect for the thousands of soldiers who died? Does refering to the start of a major project as D-Day hurt veterans who were there? "It's like the Somme out there" - clearly, there aren't really thousands of British troops being mown down by German machine guns, but I doubt anyone would be offended.
Bloody americans take everything so damn seriously.

Re:Come on

[Anonymous Coward]

I notice you posted that AC. Is that because you can't really put belief in your own words?

Says somebody whose only identifying information is the nym "SuperKendall"? Give me a break you stupid hypocrite.

I don't care how much you try to explain the quote away as "metaphor", it's simply not appropriate to craft a metaphor for information loss from real people dying

That's your opinion, and it's not shared by many people. Somebody else posted examples, but Dave Winer himself actually referred to people as "Standards Nazis" a few days ago. Christ, metaphors involving people dying are part of our fucking language. Look up the etymology of the word decimate for example.

Re:Come on

[Myrrh]

Well, for one thing, all the expressions you cited as examples are almost never used here in "bloody America," at least not that I've heard, anyway.

And for another, all of those events happened a long time ago -- at least sixty years ago for D-Day, and longer for the others. The memories of those particular events aren't as harsh as those of 9/11 -- after all, it happened not even three years ago yet. A lot of people here still can't even stand to watch a movie or see a picture with the Twin Towers in it, due to the memories they bring back.

You would be a fool if something similar to the events of September 11 happened to you and your country, and you didn't take it seriously.

You need to gain some perspective.

Re:Come on

[BenjyD]

The death toll from the Troubles in N. Ireland is currently around 4,000. Large parts of Manchester city centre were flattened after the IRA set off a 3000lb bomb there. Yet nobody feels they have to tiptoe around the subject and not use it as a metaphor because someone might be offended.
Stop being such a typical self-righteous American.

Re:Come on

[Anonymous Coward]

Something 'similar to the events of September 11' *has* happened here in the UK, namely the death-toll from the numerous IRA actions over the years. It tickles me that after not hearing anything from the US about the death of all those UK civilians, we're supposed to fawn over you for the one single terrorist attack on *your* soil? Were the IRA brave freedom fighters against the British oppressors? That's *exactly* how extreme factions in the Muslim world see themselves and the US!
And you have the brass neck to say the OP needs to gain some perspective? Priceless.

Re:Come on

[Anonymous Coward]

Who are you arguing with? It wouldn't have been appropriate to make an IRA comparison, either. Stop reading things into what people say that aren't there - you are just betraying your own stupidity and bitterness.

Re:Come on

[Anonymous Coward]

If the comment had been "Last night was like an IRA bomb silenced the voices of 3000 bloggers at weblogs.com", it would have been in equally bad taste, someone would have said so and gotten modded up, just like here. It has absolutely nothing to do with being American, it has to do with showing some tact.

sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

i am truly sorry to those that lost anything.

As I am planning to leave this world permanently, I will simply say that I hope you all the best.

Good luck!

Blogs are gay?

[JRHelgeson]

For those that state that weblogs are gay... WTF do you think Slashdot is?!

Don't look now, but everyone here is blogging! SSShhhhhhhhh!

It sure as hell isn't the New York Times!

Re:To all saying users should backup their blogs..

[mjkjedi]

Users who care enough about their data should make sure they can back it up -- and if not, move on to a different service. It's as simple as that. If, as others have mentioned, LJ offers XML backups of posts, users should either take advantage of this or not be surprised when it all goes kaput someday.

I wrote the software I use to blog, have shell access to the server it runs on, etc. I won't lose posts or comments because I back up both regularly. I won't ever find my backups in an unreadable format, because I wrote the software that parses that format.

(I obviously didn't do this for practicality -- there are more efficient ways to achieve the same thing, but I wanted the learning experience of writing the stuff myself. And the effect is still the same -- I'm taking care of my data.)

I'm a bit of an extreme example, but the point is that people need to take the initiative, and make sure their data is safe, if they care that much about it.

Re:TOS vs common courtesy

[otisg]

"Only in such a sick culture could the terms of a contract take precedence over common courtesy. It would've cost him so much to give people a couple of days to get their shit in order?"

You can also look at TOS vs. common courtesy the other way around:
No matter what the TOS said, if you are/were getting free service, and this service is provided by an individual whose circumstances have changed and are outside his control, use your common courtesy and accept that your blog is now gone.

Like other have said:
1. if your blog is so important, why didn't you back it up?
2. why trust an individual (or a company) with your precious data and trust them with the only copy of your data

You get what you pay for...

[IronChef]

... sometimes, a little less.

a lesson for givers...

[yow2000]

This reaction is a lesson for anyone thinking of giving anything away for free.

Responsibilities come with giving a gift, so that the giver is no longer free, but instead also gives away some of their own freedom, and is bound by the recipients to give them more.

Do these responsibilities really come with giving a gift? I'm not sure.

But look at the reaction.

Programmers says it all

[Anonymous Coward]

Programmers, you said programmers. Programmers are not sysadmins. Programmers cannot be expected to back up their data, that's someone else's job if they even consider that.

Now, if he were a sysadmin I would be more understanding of your comment.

Re:Not any more then normal traffic really..

[Moraelin]

To complement what Just Some Guy already said, these are bloggers. If you gave them a week warning, they'd just spend the week posting whiny crap about how this sucks. And linking to each other so they would rank high on Google.

(Obviously, no actual information page should be allowed to show in the first 10 pages of a search for that topic on Google. Some airhead's whining and web equivalent of masturbating in public for attention is, of course, _the_ only authoritative source of information anyone should ever need on the net.)

I.e., yes, it would have served little purpose except to create more useless traffic.

Plus, I doubt that any of that data was worth backing up anyway. As I've said, the whole thing is more about verbal wanking in public for attention (and not getting it anyway) than about having any useful information on that site.

Cluetrain Manifesto

[nacturation]

I find it ironic that Winer was a big proponent of the Cluetrain Manifesto. Point 31 says:

• Networked markets can change suppliers overnight. Networked knowledge workers can change employers over lunch. Your own "downsizing initiatives" taught us to ask the question: "Loyalty? What's that?"

Yep. Looks like loyalty just went out the window. :)

Re:Cluetrain Manifesto

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh no! People will no longer be loyal to the service he doesn't offer!

Say it isn't so!

Re:Cluetrain Manifesto

[Pathetic Coward]

Cluetrain Manifesto?

Isn't that the thing I see at those temporary "book sale" shops that rent vacant shopping mall space to sell remaindered books? And isn't it on the same table with all the rest of the 1990s "make money fast in dotcoms" tomes?

Re:Cluetrain Manifesto

[nacturation]

Yeah, the Cluetrain Manifesto is sitting on the clearance rack right next to the GNU Manifesto. :)

SorceForge

[Vitus Wagner]

This is why I don't keep any of my web resources on the servers I don't have root access to.

Others are almost as bad

[slydder]

I have to admit that I am in the hosting industry. However, I try and keep my personnal site seperate from where I work and so I tried ineedhosting.net once. NEVER AGAIN! I was with them a total of 2 weeks and couldn't even get a dump of my DB (they just deleted it) and lost 2 new stories I had been working on. I ended up reg'ing my domain elsewhere and am very happy now. I can't understand why people can't send an email. What is sooooo difficult about sending a mass mail? You have all the email addresses. I can understand how things can get out of hand (financially or otherwise) enough to force one to close down services but the least one could do is to warn the people that have placed thier trust in you. Very shallow thinking in my opinion.

may be...

[hutkey]

...they tried to remove the "unwanted" past from the memory for all the users

It just occured to me!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a new cool business model. Shut down a free weblog service abruptly and then sell its content back to bloggers for money.

stupid bitch

[Anonymous Coward]

She is cruel and mean, so I was mean back.

Bitching at a guy with health issues who pays his own money to colocate a server that takes up gigs of bandwidth a week.

God. What a bitch.

You can see that I posted a bitch as a comment several times in each of her posts at her site.

I suggest everyone do it too, flood her server and make her pay a large bill for bandwidth charges.

First time a slashdotting was useful. For teaching a bitch paying bandwidth costs isn't fun and giving her a taste of what Dave was paying for thousands of blogs.

EVERYONE FLOOD HER BLOG!

- Jon_K

Posted AC cause i'm sure people will downmod this.

Re:stupid bitch

[The MESMERIC]

... Welllll, that boggler's a bitch, she's a big fat bitch, She's the biggest bitch in the whole wide world, She's a stupid bitch, if there ever was a bitch, She's a bitch to all the boys and girls! On Monday she's a bitch, on Tuesday she's a bitch, On Wednesday through Saturday, she's a bitch Then on Sunday, just to be different, She's a super King Kamehameha bee-itch! Have you ever met my BLOGGA? She's the biggest bitch in the whole wide world! She's a mean ol' bitch, and she has stupid hair, She's a bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch! Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, She's a stupid bitch! That blogger's a bitch, and she sucks a dirty dick! Talk to kid-bloggers around the world, it might go a little bit something like this! Chinese Singers: *singing* French Singers: *singing* Dutch Singers: *singing* African Singers: *singing* Cartman: Have you ever met my blogger-bitch? She's the biggest bitch in the whole wide world! She's a mean ol' bitch, and she has stupid hair, She's a bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch! Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, She's a stupid bitch! My BlOGger's a bitch, and she sucks a dirty dick! I really mean it! She's a bitch - She's a big, fat, fucking bitch! Big ol' fat fucking bitch, EVERYONE FLOOD HER BLOG! Yeah! Cha!

Another Testament to Stupidity

[thebdj]

Alright one thing I need to throw in my habitual gripe about is to the idiot weblogger who apparently is Dave's love buddy. We do own stuff on the internet. It is called are intellectual property. Anything you write online as "original art" is considered copyrighted material. I would hope a person who posts his own thoughts and ideas in a weblog would appreciate something of this magnitude to some degree but obviously not.

I do appreciate the importance of IP. I have written as a columnist for a student paper and would have been irate (and still would be) if I ever found someone using my original material as my own. So IP is sacred to anyone who writes, draws, or writes original code (which rarely happens).

Dave apparently fails to see that allowing users to request their material isn't enough. You may have cut many of them off from the only copy of their IP and have prevented users from seeing it. If any large company or government body did this is would be called censorship, in this case it is just outright stupidity.

Re:Another Testament to Stupidity

[praxis]

A private entity not providing continued free distribution of one's IP is not censorship. For a government to provide a medium and then to permit certain messages but not others is censorship. Storing your only copy of your original work on someons free server, with whom you have no contract or agreement is just plain irresponsible.

Re:Another Testament to Stupidity

[thebdj]

Thats why I said in this case it isn't censorship. Geeze Us. Read you dope before you randomly start posting nothing.

Brains?

[adamofgreyskull]

In my experience, brains are sucked out prior to most bloggers ever touching a keyboard.

Re:Brains?

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially in the case of this loser.

Scalability and utility

[treerex]

This whole thing makes me wonder about the scalability and maintainability of the underlying software controlling these blogs.

If you assume that bloggers registered with their legitimate email address, I would have thought it would be a small matter of scripting to tar up the content and email it to the owner. Bandwidth issue? Send two sites per minute: in a little over 24 hours everyone can get their content.

I get the feeling that Winer has to manually export and package each blog: sad. What provisions are made for backups then, short of using wget to slurp your entire blog?

Scott Young, Chairman and CEO of the new company

[Anonymous Coward]

LOS ALTOS, CA -- May 17, 2004 -- UserLand Software, Inc., the venerable weblogging and web content management company formed by Dave Winer in October 1988, today announced the execution of a transaction whereby certain of its assets and operations were acquired by a new corporate entity. The new company, UserLand Corporation, acquired the assets and operations of UserLand Software related to the products Manila and Radio UserLand, plus the "UserLand" brand name and website. The new company will operate under the name "UserLand Software".Scott Young, Chairman and CEO of the new company, said that the transaction resulted as a consequence of a number of decisions made after Mr. Young and several other experienced technology executives took over the management of the original UserLand in November 2003

Was it really Dave Winer?

[xtermin8]

May 17, 2004 UserLand Software, Inc., the venerable weblogging and web content management company, today announced the execution of a transaction whereby certain of its assets and operations were acquired by a new corporate entity. The new company, UserLand Corporation, acquired the assets and operations of UserLand Software related to the products Manila and Radio UserLand, plus the "UserLand" brand name and website. The new company will operate under the name "UserLand Software".

Vote with your dollars

[MicroBerto]

Now there's a great way of doing business -- alienating and pissing off 3000 of your customers that probably pay at least 20 dollars a month!

People, quit crying. It's YOUR responsibility to keep backups. Now go take your business elsewhere and don't give money to assholes. It's that simple.

Sign up here

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to see people lose their sits, while we do not use Manila, we do utilize Mambo. We are a small hosting company, and cannot afford to give sites/bandwidth away for free, but we are willing to allow people to host thier personal blogs for $60 per year. If anyone is interested please email me directly at bnewport@appws.com. Good luck to everyone that lost their site.

A Little Perspective...

[reallocate]

As he's said (just in case, you know, a few Slashdotter's don't actually know what they're talkng about because they don't read anything beyond /.'s well-spun lede), the blogs were hosted on servers belonging to Userland, the California corporation Winer founded but left two years ago after heart bypass surgery. Userland apparently recently cleaned its corporate house, letting go of several activities and interests that they were supporting but which do not, and will not, bring in any revenue. That included the blogs.

Winer seems to have wanted to migrate the blogs to Cambridge, Mass, where he is now a visiting fellow at Harvard. However, when he loaded up a server with the blogs, it turned to molasses. (If memeory serves, they run on a Windows server.)

The obvious solution was to buy more hardware and spread the blogs among several servers. I can't really blame Winer for not doing that: He'd become a defacto freebie hosting service (there are no ads on these free sites, so no chance for any revenue); he'd need to hire staff to perform the migrations and manage the servers (his comments clearly indicated that the doctors have told him to stay away from the stress of programming and admin'ing); and he's about to leave Harvard and move elsewhere.

As far as the TOS goes, I once briefly used another free Userland/Winer blogging facility and, I believe, those TOS clearly indicated that there the sites were hosted, in effect, at the pleasure of Userland. They made no claims about support, uptime, or lifetime.

That said, the notice to the users was very abrupt. We don't know if this had been in the works for weeks or for hours. If the decision to take down the sites was made weeks ago, then the notice to users should have been given weeks ago. If the decision was made abruptly, everyone was left holding the bag.

Perhaps a better solution would have been for Userland to send out the shutdown notices and for no one to make any attempt to keep the sites alive.

Re:A Little Perspective...

[silicon not in the v]

I think people may have missed the significant point of how this happened. They wouldn't have sent out a notice about impending closure from Userland because they weren't planning to close them at that point. Dave was planning to migrate them and keep them going. It was only after they had been moved that it was discovered how he had underestimated the amount of server power needed. The new home couldn't handle running them, much less the load it would have been hit with if everyone had been notified and started backing up their sites. It was unfortunate, but at least he's setting up a way for people to get their content back. I can't believe people are so upset about losing access to their hobby for a couple weeks. It's a hobby someone else pays for, too.

Re:A Little Perspective...

[reallocate]

Agree that the animosity I've seen expressed by some is inexplicable. The web seems to give a lot of people permission to be completely self-centered. It's as if they think other people are obligated to give them something.

Re:A Little Perspective...

[gid-goo]

I'll tell you why in one acronym: TADW. This is a little old but it's a good start. People don't like Dave Winer. That part is entirely explicable. He's an asshole.

Re:A Little Perspective...

[reallocate]

Never met Winer, but I'm aware of his reputation. Doesn't change things, though. If people want to be annoyed because they got next-to-no notice that their free hosting service was coming to an end, fine. If they just want to play "Let's bash Winer", then that's silly. I haven't seen anyone make a credible case that he has a requirement to continue supporting thousands of free sites if he doesn't want to do that.

back up your information...

[night_flyer]

...when dealing with third parties, especially when that third party is offering a free service.

Used more than a week?

[RogL]

Anyone who's used a computer more than a week (for: text-editing / programming / blog / Web stuff / mission-critical data processing / whatever) should know to ensure their data is backed-up. After, say, a month, they should know to only trust a backup after a successful test-restore. Preferably onto a different system, to catch any hidden dependencies.

How to instill this? School computer labs should explain the concept of "saving often" and "backups" to students, hand out assignments, then shut the lab power off 10 minutes later. This may drive home the difference between DRAM and persistent media...

Re:Used more than a week?

[Cro Magnon]

I learned my lesson about "save often" early on. When I was still new at my job, I was coding like crazy, typing for hours, and suddenly the LAN connection went down! Naturally, I hadn't saved my work, and I didn't get much sympathy from my cow-orkers, just a "welcome to the club" comment. After that, I made sure to save often.

3000 Weblogs 3000 Bloggers

[Anonymous Coward]

First, I notice that many of these posts say that "3000 bloggers" have lost their sites. This is just not true. I know that at least three of these sites were mine. I created them for various purposes, they ran their course, and when I was through with them I let them go to seed. I'm sure that I'm not the only one to do so. I lost nothing when they were shut down. In fact, my contact information was not current, so Winer would not have been able to contact me if he had tried. I'll bet that I'm not alone in THAT respect, either.

Second, as many people pointed out, these accounts didn't cost me a dime, and they didn't make Winer a dime. There were no ads on the sites. Winer didn't harvest my email to sell to spammers, and he didn't spam me myself. I got a hell of a lot more than Winer did. I got the use of his site for four years. I got the opportunity to experiment with weblogs. I got the use of a first-class weblogging system. Winer's software is far and away the best system that I've tried. The themes were professional and well-designed, the software was intuitive and a pleasure to use, and the response time was usually exceptional. Going from Userland to another system -- Blogger, for example -- was like going from OS X to Windows 3.1. (Brrrr.)

It was a free service that went on long after the Internet bubble burst and other free services disappeared. It was fun while it lasted. Could Winer have done a better job of weaning people off the system? Maybe. I don't know, and neither do you.

Oddly enough, I don't recall any /. posts from people saying that they lost their own sites when Winer pulled the plug. (Although I have to say that the posts here are downright sedate compared to the people at http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/002739.h tml, who seriously need to go back on their meds.)

blogger never had a future

[Anonymous Coward]

it provides less feature than yahoo groups, less useful than wiki. what do you expcet? just B. Gates boasted it himself and hoped to make another few billions out of it?

IANAL, but its not a contract

[mekkab]

If he's giving you something for free, and there is no obvious quid pro quo, EVEN if you both signed a document in blood that got notarized, most courts would say "there is no contract. Pound sand, blogger."

changes log

[kisrael]

I wonder if the front page "changes" log is going to remain...that's been a useful way for me to get around 10 or so extra hits per update, and some of those people have become regulars of my site (not weblogs.com hosted)

The Difference Between Understanding and Enraged

[thelizman]

The "understanding" user said it all. He got more than he 'didn't pay for'. Some people - like "enraged" act as if the world owes them something for free. Get a clue people - unless you actually pay for a service, you have not right what-so-ever to expect anything, including continued service.

Also worth noting, "understanding" is calm and rational. "enraged" is a whining snarling back-biting little bitch. For those of you considering provided an internet based service free of charge, think about the multitudes of "engrageds" out there.

Was it a free service?

[nurb432]

Was the blog owners paying for service with a contract or was it free?

If there was no contract, then there was no reqirement for him to say boo or give you your data back..

May be bad practice but hey, if I'm running someting on a free server, i would plan ahead.

Slashdot Effect Helps

[FU_Fish]

I'm sure the slashdot affect is helping his problems. Not only is he having to close 3000+ weblogs, but his bandwidth is probably being sucked dry by slashdotters right now.

Just set up your own blog site

[Gilmoure]

PHPOsxom

Easy way to get weblogs.com content back: Google

[eggboard]

If you don't want to interact with the fellow who shut the blogs down (I've promised to never say his name in print again for the same reason the Indo-European root of "bear" is actually "brown"), I've written a short and sweet way to extract all of your blog posts in somewhat ugly but complete form using Google.

Essentially, enter a Google query in the form

site:YOURDOMAIN.weblogs.com UNIQUE_WORD

Unique word should be something that appears on every page. Now get one of those slurping programs that downloads Web pages. Point it to the Google URL and set it to one level deep. It'll retrieve all the pages via Google's Cached link. repeat for each page of Google results. Now you have your content, and if you've clever, you can write a shell script to extract the unique text and eventually recreate your blog without any "bear" involved.

Re:fp

[Anonymous Coward]

wrong. go back to your own country you terrorist piece of shit.

hmm...

[TheEmpyrean]

Oh darn, a bunch of whiny little bloggers didn't make backups of their material the had hosted on a FREE service and it suddenly disappeared. You know what some say? That's a damn shame The service was yanked by the owner who paid for it out of his own pocket, and most of them probably never sent him a cent. What does mean he owes them? Not a damn thing.

What TOS???

[Roadkills-R-Us]

Did he provide anyTOS? I doubt it. Most free services are completely "at will". Without knowing all the facts, we can't address how he "should" have handled it.

While I feel for the bloggers who lost their blogs, you get what you pay for. There's an amazing amount of "I demand everything on my own terms" on the internet. IMO, that's a stupid attitude. I suppose I could take it, too, and declare that food, like {blogs,information,software,pick one} should be free, and insist you all give me food so I don't have to buy it. Would that work? I seriously doubt it. In fact, I very much hope not.

And even if you choose to offer me a hamburger today, that doesn't require you to provide me one tomorrow.

I'm responsible for feeding myself. I'm responsible for my internet connection, backups, and everything else. If I enter into a contract with someone, and they agree to provide me with thes ethings in return for money (or food, or whatever), then I'm providing for myself, and they now have a responsibility as well.

It's unclear at this point just what Mr. Winer's responsibilities are in this case, but I seriously doubt they are greater than those of the bloggers.

Bad idea

[butane_bob2003]

He could have transitioned to a for-pay model. With 3000 blogs, he could have charged a dollar per month each and probably turned a little profit.

Re:Bad idea

[DaveCBio]

He didn't want to. He stated that and knowing how bitchy and whiney people get when they pay for something I can see why. Hell, they're usually bitchy and whiney when they get a service for free.

Show me examples

[SuperKendall]

Ok then, show me examples anywhere on the web of someone saying something along the lines of "cleaning these floors is kind of like blowing up some poor Irishman who was in the wrong place at the wrong time".

I don't generally go around making metaphors out of terrible events myself. Though it is easier for people to do so with distance (like making fun of starving people in Africa). But one other problem with the events of 911 is that they were better recorded than any other like it in history, i.e. you can actually see the people jumping from 80 stories because it was the only option that brought relief from the intense fire (also reported on extensivly). So the whole thing is much more vivid in people's minds.

I'm not a slef-righteous American - just not an asshole. I have and show respect for ANYONE who has had some tragedy in my life, not just Americans. Does that make you an overly thick-skinned European?

Re:Show me examples

[BenjyD]

Ah, ignore me. Just in a bad mood with the US after seeing the idiocy of their federally-funded "abstinence is the answer" program on the news last night.

Re:Show me examples

[Anonymous Coward]

"cleaning these floors is kind of like blowing up some poor Irishman who was in the wrong place at the wrong time".

You have no idea where Manchester is do you?

Who gives a Damn?

[Anonymous Coward]

Web logs are stupid and the people that use them are stupid. These dumbasses should have known that since it's free it could go away at anytime. The only regret I have is not being there with him to pull the plug. Besides webhosting is cheap. You want to have your fucking blog, fork out 20 bucks someplace post your life to your hearts content.

Good

[Anonymous Coward]

The less web logs the better I say.

Blogs are mental diarrhea...

[Lorem_Ipsum]

Now that I have your attention, let's summarize the threads, shall we?

48%: Dave Winer is a [great guy | internet saint | complete a**hat | arrogant prick] and something must be seriously wrong with his [health | mind | attitude | bowels] to have to abruptly discontinue this service.

47%: Blogs are a [useful tool | brilliant form of self-expression | blight on the internet | form of intellectual masturbation] and should be [lauded in all the earth | trumpeted from the hilltops | wiped from the face of the internet | grounds for committment to a mental health facility].

3%: No backups? HA HA!

1.998%: Blogs make using Google hard. Waah.

0.002%: Isn't Slashdot a form of weblogging?

Of course, the most interesting thing here is that reading the posts on each viewpoint tells you more about the writer than about the thing they are writing about. Oh no! Recursive weblogging! Damn, and I used to have a life before this whole internet thing.

Business

[simpl3x]

Everybody loves to talk about TOS, and bandwidth costs, and leacherous users, but the real point is business. Not capitalism. You have removed the business from the mileu it exists within. Dave is no longer involved with Userland. Is he still an investor? A board member? In some ways he is inseperable from his company.

As a business person, I look at continuity, rationality, steadiness... in the products and services that I buy or use. When I offer a service, that service needs to be handled in a way which does not reduce my reputation. Let's say that I agree to perform a service for a company, and later decide that it does not meet my goals professionally or in profitability. I decide this one evening over a glass of wine, and call my client the next morning to exit. You can be sure that my reputation will suffer, and other businesses will consider me and by extension my business to be flaky and "untrustworthy." Trust in a business sense. FedEx has been entrusted to deliver my package overnight, not in two days, overnight. Sure, the terms of service declare that I have no recourse. Is that the point. According to "economics" it is. According to business, it is not. The point is they would not get my business.

I have recently considered creating a weblog, and have. I have also recently considered a business blog as a service to my clients, and am in the process of exploring it. These services will cost a fair amount of money if executed well, in a 24/7 sort of way. I looked at Userland, and by extension Dave, and considered it to be a business risk to deal with the company in several ways, which I will not elaborate upon (not a bad way). So, that company will lose at least several thousand dollars in business a year. Simple is it not? Every "business" person knows that even if the work is pro bono, it reflects upon the business good or bad. They offered to host weblogs for free, likely as a "loss leader." And, exited in a way which creates confusion, FUD, and controversy. They need to speak with a public relations firm!

Re:Easy way to get weblogs.com content back: Googl

[tokul]

site:YOURDOMAIN.weblogs.com UNIQUE_WORD

how about
site:YOURDOMAIN.weblogs.com -NONEXISTENT_WORD

NONEXISTENT_WORD should be something that does not appear on any blog page.

WTF OMG LOL!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL!!!
Granted none of those links are saying that Linus is an asshole; this is just an example of how Googling for things like that can be misleading.

Re:Easy way to get weblogs.com content back: Googl

[eggboard]

Brilliant! Collective intelligence wins again. Thanks -- I'll update my page.

Upgradeable too

[Stevyn]

When dealing with audio blogs narrated, you can write it as "oggs"

Excellent

[meehawl]

This is the funniest thing I've read in days!

As an ISP

[mabu]

this stuff really pisses me off... not the closing down of the site... the hoards of whiny little selfish users who sucked at this guy's teat, cost and ad-free for so long and then have the audacity to whine and complain.

Web hosting whores and other "free" services contribute to these problems and breed a new brand of user who thinks that other people should pay for "free" services that he demands. There'd be a lot more innovation and better customer service if users weren't so pathetically cheap and insensitive to what it takes to make these services reliably run.

Why didn't you sue them?

[autopr0n]

I mean, you'd been paying them to back up your site, and they didn't. Sounds like lawsuit fodder to me. Really, they completely screwed you.

Re:WTF OMG LOL!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you having trouble reading what I wrote? I didn't say "800 people have called Dave Winer an asshole". I said that you should read the pages that contain both terms for insight into Dave's past behaviour.

only the /. linux junkies would whine like this

[cball2k]

Leave it to the linux junkies of slashdot to whine and cry that something free was shut down. When will the leeches stop bitching and realize that real world cost means someone has to pay for THEIR free rides....

a few ideas you whiny freeloaders should think about

1 - get a job
2 - host your own services
3 - STFU when your freebee is shut off
4 - get a clue

Re:only the /. linux junkies would whine like this

[The MESMERIC]

shut porky
go back to work
that is what offshoring companies expect of their pawns.

Re:only the /. linux junkies would whine like this

[cball2k]

"shut porky" ????wtf is that???

Re:only the /. linux junkies would whine like this

[The MESMERIC]

shut up porky.
oh fukk its rare but i did press submit before
checking (listening to live radio)


yeah i know its kinda "pithetic"! hahaha

Re:TOS vs common courtesy

[Grrr]

Thanks - your post is a very pragmatic summary.

With free-as-in-beer services, you usually get what you pay for. I have been seriously annoyed when free web hosting firms suddenly "went away," but I still think you make an excellent point by reminding us that "common courtesy" goes both ways.

And peoples' failure to back up their own data... well, that's no one else's fault.

<grrr>

Re:Not any more then normal traffic really..

[cbreaker]

Even if that was really true, there were only 3,000 blogs. Most of them small. None of them very large.

It would have been minimal bandwidth. He could have asked for donations at the end to cover any excess bandwidth requirements, if any.

First rule of backups.

[Big Sean O]

Only back up the data you want to keep.

If you can't afford to back it up, tough buttons. You should've thought of that before you got the data.

TANSTAAFL

[Anonymous Coward]

Live it, Love it, Learn it.

3000 Screaming Bloggers

[meehawl]

As I read more about this tempest in a blogcup, for some reason the baseline to 10000 Screaming Faggots kept going through my head. I think I'm off to Soulseek for a quick download...

The Most Suprising Thing of All...

[madmaxmedia]

The most surprising thing of all out of this fiasco for Winer and the bloggers is that Winer apparently had no idea suddenly pulling the plug without warning would upset some people- Such slams had Winer shaking his head. "This thing has been blown so far out of proportion," he said. "It's just unbelievable to me." Very few could have predicted the Pistons would win in 5, but anyone with half a brain could see the response coming from this. Apparently he still is having a hard time coming to grips with it, I'm not sure why. He's not some corporate suit who doesn't even know what a blog is. If he had actually anticipated this, he could have provided some sort of warning a couple of months in advance. Then people who wanted backups could have done so, without a mad rush of traffic over a short period of time. He of course had no obligation to do this, but that would have been the much smarter thing. (Of course, if there was some sudden serious medical emergency then that could preclude everything.)

Time and distance

[SuperKendall]

Says somebody whose only identifying information is the nym "SuperKendall"? Give me a break you stupid hypocrite.

Kendall is my real name, and together with the nym is enough to find the real me pretty easily.

I see you're stil posting AC Mr. Coward. (or have you forgoot what the C in AC is for?). There is a place for AC posters, when retribution might exist, but to post mere opinion behind the cloud of AC is the sign of a weak mind who does not have any faith in what they say. So because you know I can just shoot your arguments down again you post AC so that there can be no record of your humiliation. Not everything I say is always right but I am willing to go on record that *I* said it. The takes a bit of courage that seems to elude you.

That's your opinion, and it's not shared by many people. Somebody else posted examples, but Dave Winer himself actually referred to people as "Standards Nazis" a few days ago. Christ, metaphors involving people dying are part of our fucking language. Look up the etymology of the word decimate for example.

The difference is pretty clear, and works on mutiple levels - you might not realize this, but the Nazi's were not victims!! You don't see quite so many casual metaphors related to people in gas chambers, for example.

But also a lot of time has gone by since the Nazi era, so people feel more free to refer to such things more casually. Do you think the term "Grammer Nazi" would have been quite as widespread the year after WWII ended?

Just because you have no tact or compassion, don't try to push it off as a virtue or complain about people who do. Don't you even remember (or know) the golden rule of Usenet, where all arguments are automatically ended by someone bringing up Nazis? And the guy who brougt up Nazis was not considreed the winner either, just a patheric loser who had to resort to the Ultimate Analogy.

Re:Time and distance

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a place for AC posters, when retribution might exist

Or when you aren't registered. Or when you think a discussion is so off-topic you don't want the +1 associated with a login for fear of annoying people surfing at +1 threshold. Or when you are away from your usual computer and can't be bothered to log in for a quick, off-topic comment. There are plenty of reasons for posting as AC, and, as the accuser, the burden of proof is on you to show that your allegations towards me are true. But to be honest, I don't particularly care, as your attempt to discredit my argument because of my identity is nothing but an ad-hominem attack, and we all know how clever they are, don't we?

But also a lot of time has gone by since the Nazi era, so people feel more free to refer to such things more casually.

A few thousand people died in the 9/11 attacks. You're right, the difference is immense. But not in the way you think. You seriously think that genocide fifty years ago is appropriate metaphor material but a couple of buildings falling down a few years ago isn't? I think it's you who needs perspective.

Just because you have no tact or compassion, don't try to push it off as a virtue or complain about people who do.

I have tact and compassion. I personally wouldn't have chosen that metaphor. But the original complaint wasn't that the metaphor was tactless or without compassion, it was that it was disproportionate. I was complaining about the poster's stupidity for thinking that the person making the metaphor was claiming that it was an event of the same magnitude in the world. I was not claiming that the metaphor was tactful or compassionate.

Don't you even remember (or know) the golden rule of Usenet, where all arguments are automatically ended by someone bringing up Nazis?

Actually, Godwin's Law doesn't say that. It says that as a Usenet thread continues, the probability of somebody being compared to Hitler or Nazis approaches 1.0. It's a common misconception that the Law states that the thread is over, I guess it's you that needs to brush up on your net history.

Oh, and this isn't Usenet.

Actually...

[SuperKendall]

Actually I've been there which makes it even worse, I was just too focused in the "I" of IRA and forgot who they were actulally going after... good catch.

Changed URLs are a problem

[elegie]

There is a comment that the old URL will be redirected to a new URL. This could be very useful. When a provider stops providing, the change of URL can be a problem even if a new provider is found. Consider released software, etc. that contains a URL hyperlink. Copies of software with the now-invalid URL could continue to persist for a long time. It is not just web logs but also things like Web sites and e-mail addresses where the domain name or URL can be important. A while ago, there was a free webhosting service, Xoom.com but now Xoom.com leads to a money transfer service. Imagine all those with sites hosted at Xoom.com and who distributed the URLs... Keeping a local archived copy of the site could be important in case something unexpected happens. It could also be noted that when something is free it often implies a catch of some sort.

Some years ago, a law (COPPA) was passed that restricted Web sites from collecting information about young people. One unexpected effect was that a number of young people had their e-mail accounts cancelled by a company attempting to comply with the new law.