The end of free

August 21, 2001 1:28 PM

Ev Williams of Blogger's new (well new to me, anyway) project is The End of Free

What does this mean for Blogger? How will it "transition from free to fee and beyond"? What about other weblog software, is there anything you'd pay for?
posted by cell divide to general weblog-related at 1:28 PM (3 comments total)

While I still use and like Blogger and I do think that users may need to get used the fact that things maybe not be free forever on the web, I'd find it hard to actually pay for basic posting software like blogger. Mostly because there are so many different applications out there for doing this these days and part because I could actually do it myself with php and mysql if i needed to. Weblogging has become so ubiquitous these days that asking people to pay for it at this point may seem moot. Donations, however, are always a good idea :)
posted by Hackworth at 2:18 PM on August 21, 2001

There is not much to read into the future of Blogger via TEoF (and, btw, it's several months old). It's just a topic-centered blog I spun off of Evhead because I was interested and posting a lot about the subject of free-to-fee. It's now contributed to more by others than I, and I'm not really wrestling with the question so much these days.
posted by evhead at 4:49 PM on August 21, 2001

It occurs to me that that answer may perhaps sound kurt and doesn't really address the main questions. Sorry 'bout that.

I agree that Blogger-like functionality is becoming more and more common. Among other things, our deal with Trellix, once implemented in software, will go a long way towards making it ubiquitous for the average homepage newbie, as they are a leading in that space. Beyond that, I expect such functionality to eventually be in the majority of site creation/management tools and services, at which time, a separate tool with the basic Blogger functionality will serve less purpose.

Of course, I intend that Blogger will be much broader then the basic functionality. And the plan regarding free and fee is the same as it's nearly always been -- some stuff will be free, others we'll charge money for. This plan has been a long time coming, but we've started it, finally, with the ad-free Blog*Spot hosting, which, though tangential to Blogger the tool, has garnered quite a few takers. There will be more services when I feel we're ready to offer them.

There is more to the plan -- and the rest is *not* the same as it's always been -- but I'll stop there for now.
posted by evhead at 2:29 AM on August 22, 2001