Back in days of yore, Dave Winer's UserLand Software let people set up free Weblogs on its weblogs.com site.
On Sunday, Winer pulled the plug - without first warning any of the bloggers. Try to reach most of the weblogs.com sites today and you see a note from Winer that says, in part:
"I can't afford to host these sites. I don't want to start a site hosting business. These are firm, non-negotiable statements."
In an audio statement (you can read a transcript), Winer basically says what happened was that UserLand and he agreed to split off the non-moneymaking parts of the business, such as weblogs.com, and that in addition to the financial issues, getting his servers to work right with the domain structure the site had would take many months of work, which he didn't want to get sucked into.
Doc Searls, who still has a live weblogs.com site, writes:
"Thousands of us got a free ride from Dave, and Userland, over the past five years. What we got was far more than we didn't pay for. For many of us (certainly for me), the benefits have been incalculable."
Others, however, are less charitable. Halley Suitt calls it blog murder
"At least he's taken the gloves off -- if you thought he was a cuddly teddy bear friend of all bloggers -- you might want to rethink that. "
More comments here, here (and if you're still reading this far down, then be sure to check out the discussion under that post), here and here.
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