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Friday, June 18, 2004
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When I first started keeping weblogs, I felt very queasy about using
free online services that didn't immediately make it clear how to save
a backup copy of everything I had written. I did start "demo" blogs
using Blogger (http://boblog.blogspot.com)
and Manila (http://stepno.manilasites.com),
and a few others.
Ultimately, the "what if it all goes away?" feeling is why I chose
Userland Radio to do this
weblog, since it stores everything on my laptop, wherever I am, then
uploads the latest items to the service provider's server. If Userland
goes out of business, I know I can salvage the contents and put them
somewhere else, even if I have to do it one page at a time.
I like to believe most of the other free-entry blogging packages these days
have built in and well-documented backup (or even "export") routines. I hope any
students who have followed my pointers to those services also caught
my anxiety about saving copies of everything -- and USE the backup
feature.
This month that anxiety about "what if it all goes away?" belatedly hit
hundreds of bloggers who had set up free sites on one of the servers
at weblogs.com. (Most of the news stories I've seen about the temporary shutdown of
those sites haven't pointed out that the paying customers of http://radio.weblogs.com
-- including me -- weren't affected at all.)
To see what the non-paying bloggers encountered, you could have gone to any site name like http://notradio.weblogs.com on June 18 -- those hundreds of addresses
produced a screen with this text:
Weblogs.Com Hosting in Transition
Hosting on weblogs.com is in transition.
When the transition is complete, which should happen sometime during
the week of June 21, 2004, this page will disappear and you will
automatically be redirected to the site you came to see. We're sorry
for this outage, and we're working quickly but methodically to clear
it. Thanks for all the support we've gotten from users of
weblogs.com.
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If you were a blogger who expected to find months or years of your
writing at that address, the effect could be the same kind of clong
you experience when a state trooper's blue light flashes behind you.
Luckily, it was only a warning this time.
The first version of that "in transition" message must have been even more
anxiety-producing for users, since it had the phrase "no negotiating or whining." Dave Winer, the free service's founder,
admitted to running into more
problems (technical and personal) than he anticipated in moving
those free sites to a new server, part of the process of sorting out
what he owns from what his old company owns. He said he had no easy way
of alerting owners of the weblogs, which included many dormant sites, other
than shutting them down and posting a notice that bloggers who wanted copies of their sites should request a downloadable copy.
Abrupt
and startling as that "no negotiating" approach may have been, it
worked, and a couple of dozen active
users of the site soon added their addresses to the discussion list.
(See
below.) However, what
ensued went far beyond
whining: The flame war and general buzz on that discussion and other
sites was enormous, including a few hurt weblogs.com bloggers,
many grateful-for-the-free-service bloggers, and plenty of innocent or
malicious
bystanders. There were questions, hyperbole and references to old
scores, past rudenesses in various
directions, personal name-calling and ill will, most of it ancient
history in the blogging community Winer helped found and promote.
In any case, Winer and some loyal and technically savvy friends had a
transition plan in place within a few days. It was nice to see the
phrases "I'm sorry" and "Can I help?" turning up here and there, along
with an exit strategy for the bloggers. (They have three months to
decide whether to pay for hosting or move their sites.)
If you were a regular reader of a weblogs.com weblog, try using the
same name at "buzzword.com," the new transition site. For example,
here are a few chosen at random from the first requests for site
archives:
(Moving along with the transition, Winer has redirected the old
"notradio.weblogs.com" addresses so that they automatically jump to
their buzzword.com equivalents.)
Finally, here are a few links for more about the mess, but unless
you're doing a study of dysfunctional digital communities, I'd suggest
that backing up your own computer might be a better use of your time
than spending hours reading more about this.
(An earlier draft of this blog item had more links to examples of the
bloggers' discussion, but trying to sort out a "fair and balanced" list
of links would have taken forever, and discussions of colliding
personalities certainly isn't
the point of this blog. For someone it could be a master's thesis on
the social psychology of cyberspace, but not me.)
revised 6/23
6:37:20 PM 
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© Copyright
2008
Bob Stepno.
Last update:
7/19/08; 12:58:13 PM.
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