Hosting Company Shuts Down Blogging Service

The incident apparently began with the FBI monitoring certain web blogs for terrorist activity. Al-Qaeda is known to operate and spread their communication through the Internet, but the odd part about this shut down is that it was a community web service with many users.

The blogging service, Blogetery, reportedly hosted over 70,000 blogs, and most of those users had nothing to do with terrorism. Furthermore, the owner of the service is not being accused of terrorist activity either. The hosting company, Burst.net sent a warning to Alexander Yusupov to take down the sites but did not supply any official evidence of the FBI investigation. The FBI says that it did not order the service to be shut down and that Burst.net took that action on its own.

The sad part of all of this is that possibly thousands of blogs have just been erased from the Web with little regard for the innocent people who used them. The lesson to be learned, however, is that any website or service should have backups, even if the content is created by other users. Furthermore, with as many as 70,000 blogs, they also should have had some type of redundancy in place to prevent total data loss, even if it were accidental.

Source: Times Newsline

Why people keep blogging

Last week the New York Times ran a feature about several bloggers who had abandoned their blogs. They quoted statistics from Technorati stating that 95 percent of blogs are abandoned, the ruins of the lost World Wide Web. They cite many reasons. Some people thought they would become financially independent. Others thought they would become famous and suddenly have an audience without a major publishing deal. Still others simply no longer had the time to blog.

The question the article does not answer is: why do some people keep blogging? According to Technorati, there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs at any one time, but only 50,000 to 100,000 generate the most page views. Nevertheless, those people who have not become famous or rich continue to blog and probably get visits and comments from people they know with an occasional stranger here and there.

The truth is that some of us blog because we love to write. Blogging is a quick and easy way to get something off your chest. People may read it, or they may not. Writers write because they love it. Moreover, many bloggers who quit undoubtedly thought that the would be the center of attention, but as with most social media (Twitter and Facebook included), it is a participatory culture.
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PCMag: The Free Web is about to Expire

Lance Ulanoff at PC Magazine predicts that the “good old days” of free content and services is soon to come to an end. He cites many reasons for this theory. Among them are:

1. A glut of free content from largely undifferentiated sources
2. Premier providers struggling to maintain a steady flow of new content without the benefit of revenue
3. A beyond-hard economy beating back every idea, initiative, and dollar that might help float said content on the free Web
4. An uncooperative public that remains unwilling to pay for virtually anything online

A recent article from CNN reported that Rupert Murdoch’s large conglomerate News Corporation was suffering losses and would start charging for some services on sites such as the Wall Street Journal. In addition the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing in which they discussed the crisis facing print media.

The collapsed economy, Ulanoff says, has spelled out the doom of the “free web” where news, video, and hosting services are offered up for free. Web site services that offer hosting and storage for photos, videos, and pretty much anything else depend upon ad revenues that have been on a steady decline. Blogs, video, and news stories will be the minority, and the Internet will become more of a traditional marketplace, Ulanoff fears.

Source: PC Magazine
Photo: Flickr