January 31, 2002

12:49 AM

The Guardian's story on Blogger Procovers everything you've heard about in the past week, but gets interesting at the end. "We have a tremendous amount of content flowing through our system, all in these little chunks that are separate from their sites. It should be easy to index and aggregate and present to people in all kinds of different ways." Blogger as the Associated Press of weblog syndication services?
posted by mathowie (9 comments total)

i really have no itention to take this thread off-topic... but how come the guardian is always so right-on with their internet news coverage? is it nick denton's influence? is it someone else? seriouslly, i don't know many "mainstream" newspapers out there that cover the online world as well and as close to the frontiers as the guardian. big thumbs up!
posted by HeikoH at 2:35 AM on January 31, 2002

Well, the editor of Guardian Online is Neil McIntosh, who has his own blog about his favourite football team - plus the GU Online team have their own tech blog at onlineblog.com. Neil's a member of the GBlogs mailing list and online community, so part of the reason why they're so right-on is because they're very much a part of the scene they're writing about.
posted by kitschbitch at 4:19 AM on January 31, 2002

Man, can you imagine how much Dave Winer's panties would get in a bunch if someplace like the Guardian were to start using Blogger Pro?
posted by warhol at 4:20 AM on January 31, 2002

Personally, I've always thought the Guardian's coverage of the web was sterling stuff.
posted by blastboy at 8:03 AM on January 31, 2002

This is my favorite quote, "and now Blogger needs to start making some real money." Actually, I think Blogger needed to start making some real money sixteen months ago.
posted by megnut at 9:11 AM on January 31, 2002

I noticed that too, but mostly I was wondering why the title and the rest of the article were spun to make it look like as much of a one man affair ("and a small team," eh) as possible. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Jason Shellen was working on (if not for) Blogger with Ev now too.

P.S. warhol, I so did not need an image of Dave Winer in panties. If I need therapy to get over this, you're footing the damn bill.
posted by lia at 9:59 AM on January 31, 2002

I've always thought that a lot of Guardian journos are closet Mefi posters -- there always seems to be some titbit in that supplement about this site, and it's always getting coverage in the 'Weblife' column in The Editor supplement on a Saturday -- in fact, it's an unusual week when this URL doesn't appear in relation to something...
posted by feelinglistless at 12:19 PM on January 31, 2002

"I think Blogger needed to start making some real money sixteen months ago."

Amen. It amazes me that so many people were upset with my concern back then that Ev was interested in getting rich quick and selling Blogger to a bigCo for serious commercial exploitation.

As a former staff member said, "I kept thinking the business side of things would come together on its own. Tripod, Geocities, Freeservers, and/or Xoom would have contacted us, and allowed us to integrate with their free hosting systems."

Can anyone out there actually say that Blogger users would be better off if the service were owned by Geocities? The effect on the culture and community would have been poison.

As Jack Satturn said after the layoffs "I never felt like an employee of Pyra up until a few months ago, when ev made it clear that he would keep on going, trying to negotiate deals for the company, even if everyone else on the team left or was let go."

In many ways, the former employees seemed to care for Blogger on a deeper, more emotional level than Ev, who seemed more interested in flipping the business. The staff made a lot of sacrifices - they even worked for free. When Blogger lost its staff, in many ways it lost its heart too.

It's ironic to me that after all this time and after his initial resistance to the idea ("I want to turn Blogger into a successful business. Not a hobby. Not a volunteer-run organization."), Ev finally adopted a revenue model much like LiveJournal's.

In Ev's words at the time of the layoffs, "I just had to drastically scale down the plan for immediate world domination." The funny thing is, it took him a year to downgrade his plans to the point that he finally decided to release a product - something that could have been done a long time ago, would have saved jobs, and might have even attracted the investors Ev wanted in the first place (who, last time I checked, prefer buying businesses with revenue...)
posted by insomnia_lj at 6:25 PM on January 31, 2002

The Guardian does have a weblog, and as far as I can see under the T&C's of blogger pro, both the online blog and this (if they do use blogger to post to it) have to be pro blogs now. Of course with pro blogs you don't have to have the link so we don't know.
posted by nedrichards at 5:30 AM on February 1, 2002