garret posted some comments about weblogs.com today, including an idea that maybe, if a mechanism can be worked out, that it’s time to start charging for the service. At a very small amount, of course, but I had an interesting alternative thought in response.
How many blog users, I thought, actually pay for the software/service they use? Most Blogger (esp. Blog*spot), Weblogs.com, Live Journal, and GotDotNet users don’t even pay for their hosting, and I doubt that many people will pay $23.95/month for AOL just to get a Journal. So what makes you think they’d pay a penny per ping for the weblogs.com service? Assume, say, five posts (pings) per day, that’s about $1.50/month, so with which micropayment services would that work? And bloggers who don’t want to pay, are they excluded?
I think perhaps it’s time to organize an industry group called, say, Weblog Providers Association (WPA, get it?) that blog vendors and such can join and it should do things like control/fund weblogs.com, manage standards process like RSS and not-Echo, plus do promotion and lobbying for blogs and personal web publishing.
Hey, this sounds like a job for me! Ben, Mena, Ev, Dave, Anil, Sam, Brad and all the rest of you blog tycoons, what do you say?
BillSaysThis 