Note to all: the links in this article might be slow in loading. The sites I’ve linked to are getting hammered. Once you read on, you will understand why.
UPDATE: Well, if the Register is to be believed, Winer isn’t totally leaving the blog-hosting business. He’ll still host the ones who pay for it. Lovely.
It looks like there’s one big vulnerability of blogs that the Time article I posted previously didn’t mention: the fact that weblogs aren’t permanent.
Netcraft reports that 3,000 bloggers have lost access to their blogs. It’s been referred to by victims of this event as the “9.11 of weblogs.” While I wouldn’t go that far, it is a significant event, and one that everyone who blogs should take notice of.
This is a really important lesson, folks. Your Livejournal, Xanga, Movable Type page or other blog might not seem very important to you now, but you probably won’t fully appreciate its significance to you until you lose it all. Think about it: everything you’ve written, every photo you’ve posted, every memory, poem, and piece of commentary, all wiped out in seconds.
Always have a backup, folks. Especially when you’re putting your work into the hands of another person or company, and especially if that person or company is offering the service for free. Even if it’s something that doesn’t seem very important to you now, you will miss it later if it’s something you spend hours each week on. I’ve lost too much stuff in the past, stuff I thought wasn’t important or useful and then really wished I had again later, to not have learned this lesson the hard way. So now even my old, crappy, embarrassing, unfit-for-even-geocities previous version of this site is carefully archived and still alive in an “undisclosed secured location,” though damned if I’ll ever tell anyone where that location may be.
And as one poor sod is learning, it’s bad news not to have a backup of four years of work when the hosting service pulls the rug out from under it all.
While Dave Winer’s reasons for dropping his blog service are understandable, it still means that all these people are left in the lurch without access (for now) to all the work they’ve done. Further, it looks like none of these people had any notice at all that the hosting site was shutting down. So, people are understandably angry over this development.
Now, I’d appreciate it if you would please excuse the slow performance of my site today. I’m doing a full backup of all my junk right now.
For those who are stranded: there’s an effort in the works to pick up orphaned blogs from the old weblogs.com site. Mention of it can be found at allied.blogspot.com.
Also, further commentary here from a more prolific former weblogs.com user. And, to be balanced, here’s commentary from the guy who hosted the old sites. Dave Winer, by the way, is pretty much the authority in standards such as RSS and other blog scripting technologies; much of the same technology that even this site uses. So, it’s hard to say negative things, especially when he cites numerous health and personal issues as reasons for him to bow out. However, his attitude in handling all this doesn’t leave much room for endearment here. if I were him, I probably would’ve just kept my mouth shut.