29 December 2001
Thinking About Blogger
Steven has a great post up on blogger/pyra and the blogging community. In a nutshell, he speculates on the future viability of pyra/blogger, and the problems its demise would create for what has become a vibrant blogging community based upon those tools.
Steven rightly praises Ev for the hard work he's done and continues to do (not to mention the fantastic tool he's created). But like Steven, I wonder about the business plan. From the beginning, there never seemed to be any way for blogger to make money. Sure, lots of people used the tool, but its design required a central server (and dedicated net access), meaning significant costs for pyra. I would wager that even in its heyday, net advertising didn't really come close to covering costs.
So what might Ev do differently, and what might users do differently?
On that first question, I realize that users have become used to the simplicity of blogger as it is, but it strikes me that blogger might need to become a user-resident piece of software running on either a local machine or a local webhost. I don't know how feasible that is from a programming point of view, and I realize it would inconvenience users (who can now post from anywhere with net access), but that's gotta be less expensive for pyra than maintaining a central server. It could be distributed as open-source software (maintaining the advantage of being free) -- and blogger's current servers might be devoted to hosting blogger-powered sites with a view towards making some money (like blogspot, but with a more serious business model that would take into account bandwidth and disk space usage, just like regular webhosts; neither of those things are free, and in the case of heavily used sites, the pittance blogspot charges annually to remove the ads doesn't even come CLOSE to covering costs).
On the second question -- if Ev were to produce a user-resident version of blogger, I'm guessing most users wouldn't need to do much differently. But if that doesn't happen, and blogger either completely dies, or is subject to further difficulties (such as the xmas hacking), then a lot of excellent bloggers are going to be affected, which is bad for them and bad for those of us who read them. I'm guessing many of them don't have the cash or the technical acumen to go Steven's route (dedicated hosting connection, dedicated server, commercial content management software, handwritten html) or even the in-between solution of Charles Johnson (hosted relatively cheaply, custom content management software, handwritten php) or this site (hosted relatively cheaply, GreyMatter content management software, handwritten html).
I wonder if the chief drawback to those solutions would be the cost, or the complexity of setting up content management software like GreyMatter or Movable Type (which will power the next iteration of this site). I host this site for $60 annually, and that includes plenty of storage and 6 gigs of transfer. I never come close to the 6 gigs because of fairly efficient code (an added benefit of exclusive use of CSS for formatting), and even exceeding that by a slight amount wouldn't add appreciably to the costs. But are people willing to pay even that much (or more)? If so, it would be really easy to set up a hosting reselling shop where one would set up a site (content management software and all) for prospective bloggers; indeed, that's the premise behind GreyLogs. Of course, Noah Grey (GreyMatter author) or the Trotts (Movable Type developers) might object to such use of their software, which is a further complication.
In any case, it strikes me that Steven is right (as he often is) about the precarious state of blogger/pyra, and the need for everyone using blogger to back up those entries immediately (interestingly, Movable Type can apparently import blogger entries). And it's certainly worth considering what happens if blogger/pyra fails.
[Posted @ 12:52 AM CST]
