Slashdot Log In
Hosting Service Closes 3000 Blogs Without Notice
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Jun 15, 2004 09:34 PM
from the and-such-small-portions dept.
from the and-such-small-portions dept.
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."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Hosting Service Closes 3000 Blogs Without Notice
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 617 comments
(Spill at 50!) | Index Only
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)
|
2
(1)
|
2
Not a Troll (for once...) (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
New Word Coined! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
TOS (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://blog.thetechnonaut.com/)
If it is not allowed by the TOS than users have a right to be outraged.
Re:TOS (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.teaparty07.com/)
There are no paid accounts (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://felter.org/wesley/)
Re:TOS (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.nwinfo.net/~mcantrell/)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.vfemail.net/ | Last Journal: Thursday September 27 2001, @04:18PM)
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.
A Little Perspective... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
My guess at what happened (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Sunday October 03 2004, @04:03AM)
Of course, that doesn't explain why he'd use an audio message to get the word out.
Re:TOS (Score:5, Informative)
(http://--/ | Last Journal: Monday December 09 2002, @05:12PM)
he just created something he doesn't want to a) take care of b) give to somebody else.
-
Re:TOS (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Re:TOS (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://ourpublictransport.org/)
Re:TOS (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Common courtesy? (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Sunday November 05 2006, @05:31AM)
He was giving people something for nothing, and you're getting all indignant because he's decided to quit. Get over yourself.
-jcr
Re:TOS vs common courtesy (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.simpy.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday April 15 2003, @12:58PM)
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
Re:TOS (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.transops.net/ | Last Journal: Wednesday June 16 2004, @05:03AM)
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.
Backups (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Backups (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday December 30 2003, @07:21PM)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Backups (Score:5, Funny)
Newsflash... (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday September 06 2005, @12:39PM)
Re:Newsflash... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Newsflash... (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday October 20 2004, @05:23AM)
Re:Newsflash... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.geoffreyspear.com/)
Re:Newsflash... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.thepeacock.net/)
Re:Newsflash... (Score:4, Insightful)
Umm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, though... to not see this coming even a few days in advance? That's very disappointing.
Re:Umm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Umm... (Score:4, Insightful)
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... (Score:5, Informative)
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... (Score:5, Interesting)
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... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://rimuhosting.com/)
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 [rimuhosting.com]
Re:Not any more then normal traffic really.. (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday December 12 2006, @07:54PM)
Re:Not any more then normal traffic really.. (Score:5, Funny)
(http://honeypot.net/ | Last Journal: Thursday November 15, @11:49AM)
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%.
Re:Umm... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Wired article (Score:3, Informative)
(http://www.plumb.org/tekmage/)
Re:Wired article (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Monday June 21 2004, @04:25PM)
(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 (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.google.com/search?q=gilead+greene)
Seems more like parallel murder to me, since it all happened at once...
Crystal Ball (Score:5, Funny)
Oh...wait...
Audio recordings (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
And this is bad news? (Score:3, Funny)
(Last Journal: Tuesday August 17 2004, @10:31PM)
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!
Ironic (Score:5, Funny)
- sm
Re:Ironic (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Saturday February 15 2003, @02:04AM)
before the winer-hating starts... (Score:3, Insightful)
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... (Score:4, Insightful)
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... (Score:5, Informative)
You know what they say... (Score:5, Funny)
I feel a disturbance in the force. (Score:5, Funny)
Wrong. (Score:5, Funny)
No no, Slashdot is still up. :P
hatelife.org (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://replaystar.spaces.live.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday July 01, @11:07PM)
Thankfully not LiveJournal (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Thankfully not LiveJournal (Score:5, Funny)
(http://mr-mlk.livejournal.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday April 25 2006, @07:48AM)
Last I checked, buying an N Sync CD would cost you your soul.
And your pride if anyone ever found out.
understanding (Score:3, Funny)
(http://sewagemaster.blogspot.com/)
and we shall show our "understanding" by having their site posted and slashdotting their site...
Hmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.bsd-box.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday August 19 2003, @07:02PM)
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... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.pobox.com/~meta/ | Last Journal: Sunday February 29 2004, @09:19AM)
Just download blosxom. 100 lines of code. Works with any ISP, even if you don't have CGI.
Did a blog kill your mom or something? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.techgnosisweb.com/)
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? (Score:5, Funny)
(https://addons.mozil...&application=firefox)
I have the n'sync-with-a-pony dream all the time. I should start a blog about it.
wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Apparantly you haven't tried to use Google lately.
Why we hate blogs (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday August 17, @05:34AM)
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.
Mom, 54, bored to death by blogging (Score:5, Funny)
That's an unnecessary "or."
Choice quotes from the wired article (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Health problems... (Score:3, Informative)
To all saying users should backup their blogs... (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:To all saying users should backup their blogs.. (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.livejournal.com/users/k4_pacific | Last Journal: Tuesday May 25 2004, @10:16PM)
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.
Manila supports backup (Score:5, Informative)
(http://felter.org/wesley/)
Dave Winer has written in the past about why it's import for Web apps to export data [scripting.com]: "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."
It sucks but it happens (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.wuice.net/)
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.
Money (Score:4, Insightful)
This guy can do what he wants, but he handled things badly.
You get what you pay for... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Blog backup service. (Score:3, Informative)
(http://www.rage.net/~greg/)
Blog Backup Program [rage.net]
-- Greg
Dave Winer (Score:5, Insightful)
There. Now you're up to speed.
The funny thing about that to me... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Health issues?! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Listen to audio notes (Score:5, Informative)
Something that slashdot owners should consider, huh?
I set up this server... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://jerkychew.com/)
(I have to be a bit vague on the details due to NDAs and such... Sorry for not including any specifics)
Winer's Lying: backups would have been easy (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Disproportionate much? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or entirely not like that at all.
Come on (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Someone's got to say it... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://zack.cerza.org/log/)
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.
Archive old entries (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.wonderfulphotos.com/)
If you're worried about losing all your old posts, go ahead and back them up yourself. You never know..
New URLs Suck (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.fundraw.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday November 25, @02:49PM)
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
Here's The Bottom Line, Morons (Score:4, Insightful)
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
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.
From Doc Searls's blog (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://tunah.net/)
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?
Blogs are gay? (Score:3, Informative)
(http://www.appiant.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday September 21 2003, @02:10PM)
Don't look now, but everyone here is blogging! SSShhhhhhhhh!
It sure as hell isn't the New York Times!
a lesson for givers... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
3000 Weblogs 3000 Bloggers (Score:4, Interesting)
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
The Difference Between Understanding and Enraged (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.andrewkrause.com/)
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.
Easy way to get weblogs.com content back: Google (Score:5, Informative)
(http://blog.glennf.com/)
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:could it be.. no. (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Tuesday December 12 2006, @07:54PM)
Yes, it was free. No, you can't do anything about it. And yes, it was still and asshole thing to do.