When free rent has a high price
In Live and Let Die, James Bond battles Mr. Big’s diabolical plan for world domination: to flood the streets with free heroin and drive out the other dealers. Once users are hooked, the villain can raise the price of smack and control the market.
Slate brilliantly made this analogy to Google’s business model recently. Give them free email, free blogging, in short, free smack for techies, and then they’re hooked on you through sunk costs and lock-in effects.
The reason I bring this up now is because this blog was down for four hours last evening. I run this blog on Blogger.com software, which is owned by Google. And the price of this blog you might wonder? It is free.
But my landlord doesn’t live downstairs and I can’t pound on his door and demand that he turn the blog back on. So I thought I would post a suggestion for people who are thinking about starting a new blog: use Typepad. Yes it costs $10 a month but hey, it’s worth it. Consider these additional features that Typepad has and blogger doesn’t:
1. Recently posted comments displayed on sidebar. Sometimes readers stumble on an older post through a Google search and post a comment but that is lost since it is far down on the blog.
2. Ability to truncate displayed posts. You can get a flavor of a posting from the first paragraph or two and maybe it’s not your cuppa tea (glass of wine?).
3. Categories!! A problem that I had for a long time with the usability of blogs was that they are a chronological spew of information. Typepad offers the ability to categorize postings so if you are only interested in wine recommendations, for example, then view only those. Wine commentary and analysis? Check out a display of those postings.
4. Trackback. Ease of tracking links back to a posting.
5. Technorati. Technorati is a clearinghouse for information in this digital age. It seems that Blogger based blogs have a hard time getting automatically indexed because the feed is outdated.
6. Images are easier and more flexible.
7. Free user tracking.
8. More details about posted comments such as the IP address of the poster and their email address.
And many more I’m sure…This is a hard posting for me to write since not only am I a fan of Google and their legions of clever engineers, there are costs for me moving my blog’s URL. But unlike heroin addicts, I am not dependent on this Mr. Big. If moving the blog means not only keeping the lights on this winter but also getting some of the above accoutrements (consider them blogging equivalents of heat and fresh paint) thrown in as well, then I won’t have any other choice.
PS- While on the subject of technology, I just downloaded the web browser Firefox 1.5 and it is great!
On December 6th, 2005 at 7:07 pm ,Terence Hughes wrote:
I’m wondering the same things. And the Blogspot text editor sucks.
On December 7th, 2005 at 11:25 am ,jens at cincinnati wine wrote:
I am on the fence. It was funny/amusing when 90% of the wine blogs were down on Monday night. At first I thought I had lost my blog to a black hole (and how DO you back up a years worth of ramblings), but I quickly saw that everyone was down. And good luck getting a reesponse back from Google support.
If your blog is important or part of your business, then it would be prudent to move!
jens at cincinnati wine
On December 12th, 2005 at 12:43 pm ,Anonymous wrote:
WordPress – a terrific open source and flexible backend if you already have a host – has also begun a free hosting service.
Can’t speak to it since I use the other, but worth considering.
Stan at brewlikeamonk.com
On December 12th, 2005 at 6:13 pm ,Dr. Vino wrote:
Terry – nice to see that you pulled the plug on blogspot! Check it out: http://www.monosapore.com
Jens- Get off the fence–quick! You just changed your domain name after all.
Stan – yes, Word Press is also good. As are a few others whose names escape me now…
Thanks to all. Cheers,
Tyler
On December 16th, 2005 at 12:23 pm ,Dr. Vino wrote:
One more thing: in the spell check, “blog” is an unknown word…Go figure!