Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

15 responses so far ↓

• 1 Elayne Riggs // Sep 11, 2003 at 10:38 am

  My Blogger editing page now seems to have all the Blogger Pro stuff installed, but darned if I can figure out how half of it works. :) Still, it’s nice that they’re letting the non-paying folks have it now, and I’m at a loss as to why anyone feels the need to criticize that move.

• 2 Betsy Devine // Sep 11, 2003 at 12:37 pm

  Hey, I love Google as much as the next web-addict–and I’m happy for Blogger users getting new features. It’s just that the competition of many blogwares has been good for all of us users–innovations like rss feeds or trackback show up in one place and get added to others. I’d hate to see a situation like what we see with browsers, where Explorer (which is free) is so predominant it’s the only browser many websites support. Getting Explorer free was nice for users–the resulting Microsoft near-monopoly on browsers sucks.

• 3 Niek Hockx // Sep 11, 2003 at 3:59 pm

  You know, there’s something to be said for expensive, yet thoroughly build software. Photoshop or Dreamweaver have never ever crashed my computer or made it hang. Most weblog software, be it server based or on your own desktop like Radio, is not very reliable as your Google searches show. Personally I abandonded them all. Gez! You really don’t need weblog software to simply add a piece of text to a web page every day. But the first affordable content management system is yet to be invented. What puzzles me is that the whole world gets so crazy over software that basically sucks and takes it all for granted. Ney! Gets dependent on it. Just because it’s cheap or free? Mediocracy reigns again, Betsy. What else is new? ;-)

• 4 dadarara@m... // Sep 12, 2003 at 5:20 am

  I liked your little piece of Google science.

  Every day I find out new ways of ustilising google and its services. Somebody can soon publish a book on it. Just don’t call it google for Dummies. really.

• 5 Michael Fagan // Sep 12, 2003 at 7:14 am

  Someone *did* publish a book on it. Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest. Google Hacks is published by O’Reilly. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596004478/ref=nosim/researchbuz03-20

  Some of your queries (i.e. “blogger is down”) probably changed quite a bit once Blogger moved to Google’s servers. And I think that Google knew exactly what they were buying.

• 6 Robert Occhialini // Sep 12, 2003 at 7:49 am

  This information would be much more meaningful if you cross referenced it with the total number of users using each of the options you were searching against. I suspect that Blogger has far more users than any of the other options, and so the results of the searches may be skewed as a result.

• 7 megnut // Sep 12, 2003 at 7:49 am

  But Betsy, you’re comparing apples to oranges in some regards. Blogger is a hosted application and everyone connects to the same web site, whereas the other three apps you list are locally installed, either on one’s web server (Movable Type, Manila) or one’s desktop computer (Radio). Blogger’s biggest failing has been scalability, which is a direct result of its architecture. It’s biggest success has been ease-of-use, also a direct result of its architecture (newbies not having to install anything is huge).

  I’m not saying that people’s frustration with Blogger isn’t justified, it certainly is. But the comparison doesn’t really work — Blogger has a much larger user base than the other tools, and a different structure. But you did say ‘unscientific’ so I’ll lay off now. ;)

  It will be interesting to see what happens now that Blogger Pro is free. I can’t see it having that much effect since it didn’t offer much more than free Blogger, and most people who want more features still need to look elsewhere for their tool.

  Disclaimer: I co-founded the company that made Blogger, no longer work there, and use Movable Type.

• 8 Bill Brown // Sep 12, 2003 at 9:11 am

  I think the Internet Explorer-Netscape thing was more about how Microsoft bundled IE with Windows and made (makes since it’s still happening) it almost impossible to remove. Netscape was offering the browser for free and making money just the same. Further, to say that browser innovation is dead is to ignore the substantial competition extant on Mac OS X and the efforts of the Mozilla team. The only place that innovation is dead in this regard is Redmond.

  There is nothing comparable here by Blogger offering stuff free. Their basic service was always free yet somehow other competition was able to crop up. In fact, Movable Type was and is mostly free. What’s more, the concepts behind blogging tools are so simple and basic to web development that practically anyone comfortable with a server-side scripting language could create their own blogging tool in a short time.

  In fact, you don’t even need any blogging tool beyond Notepad/TextEdit and some FTP client to blog. You could make your blog by hand and have it look exactly like any other blog out there (albeit with a lot more effort).

• 9 Betsy Devine // Sep 12, 2003 at 10:13 am

  Hmmm, how to take account of the large number of Blogger users? And, just to stick with apples-to-apples, let’s compare Blogger to Manila, which I use, which is remotely installed at weblogger.com somewhere, and which has let me blog from many a coffeehouse with a wonky keyboard. Check out “I love Blogger” versus “I love Manila” (and don’t we all love the blogware we know the best, you’d figure Blogger has about twice as many users. Check out any negative comment about your blogware, and suddenly the ratio of Blogger to Manila is way up in the stratosphere. Yes, I know folks who love Blogger and use it with skill. Feel free to run your own research on the topic!

• 10 Betsy Devine // Sep 12, 2003 at 10:16 am

  BTW, a search for pages updated within the past 3 months, containing “blogger is down”+2003 gives 414 hits.

• 11 Elayne Riggs // Sep 12, 2003 at 10:39 am

  “I’d hate to see a situation like what we see with browsers, where Explorer (which is free) is so predominant it’s the only browser many websites support.” Considering how many users seem to despise Blogger, I don’t think you have anything to worry about there. :) Plus, I’m encountering more and more people who swear by browsers like Mozilla.

  “Gets dependent on it. Just because it’s cheap or free?” Heck yeah, Niek! I love the fact that I can do one-to-many writing now and not pay a cent!! I despise the idea of begging folks for money to support your hobby. If you blog for free you never have to worry about the ethics of a tip jar. FREE BLOGGING IS A WONDERFUL THING and I’d love to see Blogger’s competitors offer it too.

  “Movable Type was and is mostly free.” Ah, it’s that “mostly” that’ll get you every time. :) MT doesn’t offer free hosting, so unless you have a website capable of handling both the space and bandwidth a blog will take up you’ll be paying for it.

• 12 anonymouse@m... // Sep 12, 2003 at 11:18 am

  I am in the process of deciding on Blog software and now that Blogger Pro is free, I’m seriously considering it because 1) you have the have the option to ftp your entries to your own host (and thus I assume use your own domain name and control your own data) and 2) you do not have to put advertisements on a Blogger Pro site.

  The Moveable Type license is too bizarre for me. I want/need to be able to charge people when I help them with their blogging tool so I’m going to choose a tool for myself and the people I help that will let me do that!

• 13 Michael Fagan // Sep 12, 2003 at 11:55 am

  Using date range options on search engines is often quite inaccurate.

• 14 Betsy Devine // Sep 12, 2003 at 12:06 pm

  Better to light a candle than to curse the software engineers who haven’t figured out how to change a lightbulb….don’t you think so?

• 15 Michael Fagan // Sep 12, 2003 at 1:04 pm

  If that was directed at me, then yes.