The Hindu Business Line : Hear me, loud and clear?

The business of blogging is getting serious. Recent developments show that it could become a money-spinner. No one knows how. But here's where it's headed.

THE biggest endorsement for weblogs or `blogs' till date came from Bill Gates last month. At Microsoft's CEO Summit held at the company's campus in Redmond, Gates said blogs do have certain advantages over other communication means such as e-mail and Web sites. Gates also talked about the possibilities of using blogs in businesses.

Gates' mention of blogs set the tech-world buzzing about Microsoft's possible entry into the world of blogging. The number of blogs is swelling by the day - it is estimated that presently there are around 1.9 million blogs - and Gates is the last geek to let a business opportunity go. If and when Microsoft gets into the space of blogs, it would mark the beginning of another battle in the Web world - Microsoft on one side; firms like Google, six Apart and UserLand, who develop blogging tools, on the other.

Blogs, which are personal Web pages run by individuals to share their thoughts with others, is indeed happening, whether Gates talks about them or not. That the business of blogs is getting serious is evident from recent moves by popular blogging software developers.

Dave Winer, the man regarded as the blogging pioneer, shut down his weblogs.com, one of the first blogging sites, sparking off outrage and protests from some 3,000 bloggers. The four-year old Weblogs.com had been providing free hosting services to these bloggers.

The blogs were hosted on servers of UserLand Software, a company founded by Winer. After a management change at UserLand, Winer had to shift weblogs.com to his own server, which he found difficult to manage. However, faced with a deluge of protests, Winer later announced that blogs in weblogs.com would now be moved to another site called buzzword.com and would be hosted free of cost till mid-September. Afterwards, users can either stay on or choose another hosting service.

Another popular blogging software developer, six Apart, recently decided to go pay — and also invited the ire of bloggers. The company announced licensing charges for the developer edition of its software, Movable Type 3.0 in May, which bloggers said was too restrictive. Prior to this, six Apart had offered the software free, except for commercial uses. Nevertheless, six Apart later changed its pricing conditions and announced that paying customers can create unlimited number of blogs. Free users can create only three blogs per person.

Open-source software is also taking roots in the world of blogs. Dave Winer has announced that in the next few months, Frontier platform, the underlying engine of the Manila and Radio UserLand software tools for blog publishing, will be released in open-source. By making Frontier open-source and leaving it for the developer community at large, UserLand can focus on its other products.

Leading search engine Google too has its plans cut out for the blogging business. The company had acquired Blogger, another early mover blogging tool, last year and now has come out with new features that let bloggers post content through e-mails and create profiles. The user interface of the site and publishing tools were also revamped.

As blogging software turns pricey, will it not affect the enthusiasm of bloggers? Will users be enthused to maintain a blog if they have to pay for it? And can bloggers make money out of their blogs by attracting ads or by any other means? It may take a while to get answers to these questions, but we know that creativity can pretty well mix with economics.

mail to:vipin@thehindu.co.in

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