Alas, poor Blogger
I wanted to link to Ben Sullivan’s “RIP Blogger” piece (never mind the #comments in the url, that’s just how he refers to his permalinks), but sadly neither it nor his blog are available at the moment (RIP techblog? Guess not: it’s back the next day.). Really nothing very exciting, just another person who fails to understand that Blogger still has a place in the world, even if it isn’t available 24/7 for obsessive “must post every five minutes” bloggers. As I remember, the gist of his thesis was that with Movable Type offering $20 installation nobody would consider paying for Blogger Pro Mark 2 (if and when), failing to note the cost of hosting that will run MT. If you are dead-serious about your blogging, and you are already paying for hosting that lets you run custom CGI, then MT is probably for you (though if you really need someone to install it for you, I’m going to make fun of you ;-) ). However, for every person who is that committed to blogging, there must be a thousand more who just want to try it out, and some of those are bound to decide that giving Ev. a few bucks for more toys is worthwhile. I think where Ben went wrong was the same place I do so often: web geeks get so used to the idea of using the one best of anything (there are still search engines besides Google?) that they fail to realize that not everybody wants the same things out of their tools, and not everybody has the same perfect information about what’s available. Even if Movable Type or Radio was the perfect fit for every single blogger, there would still be plenty of market for Blogger Pro, just among people who hadn’t ever heard of the alternatives.
Given the number of times that Blogger has been declared dead, Googling RIP Blogger turns up surprisingly few results.
You can always link to Google’s cache of Ben Sullivan’s ”RIP Blogger” piece here.
I think blogger’s premium service will do well, and generate a substantially larger amount of money than their advertising revenue. There are lots of people who have been using blogger for a long time and are used to the interface. Why would they pay $40 for Radio Userland, or sign up with a $60/year cgi host to use MT/Greymatter when they can pay $30 for blogger premium, and not have to do any type of additional setup or configuration? As long as blogger still offers a free option, and their premium prices are competitive, I think they’ll do fine.
Rock on Phil for keeping the conversation moving forward. Here’s to hoping Evan blows all our socks off. One quibble, and maybe it’s on me: The $20 installation of MT is optional; for people who really don’t want to get their hands even a little dirty, just want to be able to start blogging. And for the matter of paying for hosting, I’m no moneybags, but I find $5 a month, or $60 in one fell swoop really pretty small for the benfit of having a server of your own.
Time to go add your site to my links.
Grr. Nothing worse that having a good rude flame doused by the flamee having more sense and class than you. The really painful part is that you are probably right: $80 for hosting plus a paid MT install is probably a better bargain than $42 for ad-free Blog*Spot plus Blogger Pro Mark 2. I just have an irrational fondness for the (all too often lacking) community nature of Blogger, and to me using MT seems solitary? lonely? I’m not sure exactly what describes it. Probably ”I’ve made a little bit of a name for myself by supporting Blogger, so I want people to stick with it” describes it best ;-)
From what I read about Blogger Pro, it didn’t seem worth upgrading from ad-free blogspot.