bloggertech

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?). 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.
posted by Phil Ringnalda at 8:16 PM | 3 comments

Radio Aaronland:

"And as far as the Blogger API goes, with any luck the community as a whole will develop something that *Blogger* writes to. The API, as it currently is written, fills a vacuum but I'd like to see something a little more comprehensive."

Maybe I just travel in the wrong circles, but I'm surprised that I don't hear more of this. At first I thought the Blogger API was going to be this great thing, and then nobody ever developed anything but libraries, and apps that did less than the Blogger interface, not more. Now the whole blogging world is treating Ev.'s personal, not very highly developed API, that he seems to have lost interest in (where is blogger.publish? for that matter, where are the methods that the API page doesn't even document?), as though it were the be-all end-all of blogging APIs. The only problem I see with a community standard API is getting Ev to support it (remember pinging weblogs.com?), so that it isn't just a shiny new toy the other kids get to play with.
posted by Phil Ringnalda at 10:17 PM | 0 comments

Do you ever wonder what people are thinking? There are more Radio users subscribed to the dead Evhead RSS feed than are subscribed to, say BBC world news or diveintomark. Maybe I'm wrong, but I figured that the content of Ev.'s feed ("wake up") was directed to its readers, rather than to the feed itself.
posted by Phil Ringnalda at 1:47 PM | 0 comments

BlogSnob, the free, cooperative textad service, has 1119 users (as of me) out of a planned 1500, so if you have been thinking about joining, don't put it off too long. I have to admit that when Arnab first announced it I was skeptical, but it has turned into a great promotion and site discovery tool. It took almost two months to get the first 1000 users, but I wouldn't be surprised if the last 500 spots fill up in just a couple of weeks as it hits critical mass.
posted by Phil Ringnalda at 2:17 AM | 0 comments