There’s that old quote atrributed to John Gilmore, about the Internet treating censorship as damage and routing around it. I think there’s something else just as notable about the Internet; it seems to have a sense of karma, where wrongdoings are often righted.
The big news this morning was Dave Winer’s shutdown of 3000 blogs that he had become responsible for hosting on weblogs.com. Originally they were hosted by Userland, and then at some point Userland Software split into two companies both named Userland Software, and…yeah, it’s confusing. Needless to say, Dave’s been hosting them out of his own pocket for at least the last few months, and came to the conclusion that he couldn’t afford it.
There were a number of problems with the way this was handled. I won’t bore you with details – other people have this pretty well wrapped up.
But as the day rolled into night, I was jarred with two ironic happenings, nearly back to back.
One was, in the Schadenfreude sense of irony, the inevitable slashdotting, which I would expect will drive weblogs.com as a Manilla host completely down tomorrow – if not for the traffic, for the off-topic comments that are rapidly multiplying.
The other? A number of comparisons were made today between this and the Movable Type 3 pricing structure, where the blog world collectively took a massive shit on SixApart – and it was largely justified for failing to communicate (sound familiar?) and making decisions that left a number of people scratching their heads as to how they got to the final decision.
Lo, not twenty minutes after the slashdotting, Argyle on #joiito points out that SixApart emailed out a new pricing structure. The three non-commercial tiers are now:
- Limited Free (1 author, 3 blogs, no support, free)
- Personal (5 authors, unlimited blogs, support, $70)
- Unlimited Personal (unlimited authors and blogs, support, $100).
I have a coupon I have not yet used from the beta test of MT3; tomorrow would appear to be the day I’m using it. These prices are quite reasonable, have all the ridiculous limits removed, and I certainly don’t have a problem paying that much for a piece of software I use so readily over a daily basis.
And besides – I’m well versed on how to import and export from MT by now.