Grandma’s Got a Blog
In what could only be described as another example of expanding a service to the masses while totally screwing it up for the rest of us, Infoworld has an article detailing new big-name blogging software and how it is making blogging accessible to everyone.
Now I’m fine with services such as Blogger that allow full customization and allow end users to start out small but grow and grow, but there is a line here that really needs to be addressed. Services like Livejournal are just horrible. They don’t allow any customization, the design of the site sucks, and you can’t really interact with the members unless you are a member of that community.
Now Microsoft and Yahoo are getting into the mix and you know that everyone and their brother is going to have a blog. Now that isn’t exactly the worst thing in the world, I welcome new people to the blog-o-sphere, but when big-name companies start controlling what people are doing on their blogs you will start to see how content is controlled by the large companies. For example, these services do not ping anywhere: Technorati isn’t well supported on these sites and they don’t show up on blo.gs. The ability to find information on a MSN or Yahoo! blog, compared to finding that information when it is posted here, is really limited.
My favorite part about the current blog culture is how FAST things are updated. Sure you can go to sites such as Fark and Slashdot but you won’t get the opinions of thousands of people instantly on news stories. The blog-o-sphere is great at bringing to light what really matters in the world, LIVE, and that is something that is really great for the web. I mean, lets face it, Google can’t work as fast as Technorati can (they try, though, indexing the main page and RSS feed of this site every 16-22 hours).
Lets hope that information remains free and accessible, and the people who get active on these other services start moving to platforms like WordPress as soon as possible.
