Althouse: Another reason to stick to Blogger.

October 24, 2008

Another reason to stick to Blogger.

Look what happened to Patterico.

17 comments:

PatHMV said...: What does the contract/license agreement with Blogger say about who owns "althouse.blogspot.com"? Patterico has some contractual rights, potentially, and the company may wind up being civilly liable to him. But I suspect that blogger would have the complete right to send all your posts down the memory hole without warning, or ever reassign your name to someone else, with little warning or recourse.

But of course I could be wrong. I haven't looked at the fine print of the Blogger click-through license.; 10/24/08, 10:20 AM
Brian Doyle said...: That guy really, really sucks. It's probably just the internet's natural immune system.; 10/24/08, 10:30 AM
Chris said...: I use Wordpress. I love it. But I just don't get why people rag on Blogger all the time. It's great.It's reliable, and the features are on par with just about anything else that's out there. When was the last time Blogger was down for a whole afternoon, or people couldn't post photos. Remember those days?

That being said, pathmv is right. If your blog is your business, you absolutely must have your own domain, even if you continue to use blogger or wordpress or typepad or whatever. If you're putting a lot of intellectual content on your blog towards which you feel a certain level of ownership ( are we still allowed to use that word?) then a private domain is essential, even though it comes with risks of service interuptions, glitchy servers, etc.; 10/24/08, 10:33 AM
Joan said...: Again with the false dichotomy, Ann. It's not Blogger or some ISP that will hijack your domain name. There are many choices out there, it's just not important enough to you to do anything about, and that's OK. Posts like this make you look silly and defensive.

BTW, how often are you backing up your blog? Or are you trusting that Blogger is going to keep all your archives in perpetuity? I don't, and I'm just a 2-bit blogger.; 10/24/08, 10:36 AM
Joan said...: When was the last time Blogger was down for a whole afternoon, or people couldn't post photos.

Last night I couldn't post photos. It was really annoying. I haven't tried again yet this morning because there are other things I'm supposed to be doing...; 10/24/08, 10:37 AM
Lem Vibe Bandit said...: Could this have the Obama camp fingerprints?

Ooops – there’s probably no video, and shame on me for rushing to judgment.; 10/24/08, 10:39 AM
Chris said...: I didn't realize there was still trouble with images. It's been so long since I've heard people mention any.

Another great thing about Blogger - and Wordpress is that up till now at least, they've steadfastly refused to police content, apart from the obvious sensible stuff like warning pages for adult blogs. If that were ever to change, and they were inclined or required to police the blogpsphere for "hurtful" or "unfair" opinions ( this is an issue in Canada) that would pretty much be the end of free public blogging.; 10/24/08, 10:58 AM
Ann Althouse said...: "What does the contract/license agreement with Blogger say about who owns "althouse.blogspot.com"?"

Me suing Google some day is not in the cards. I am trusting Google to take care of its reputation. That's where my bet is. See how much that contract helped Patterico? I'm preserving my work product, and if I need to migrate my blog somewhere someday, I'll do that, but I don't think any company in the world is as trustworthy as Google, and if they screw up, we are all severely screwed.; 10/24/08, 11:07 AM
Ann Althouse said...: Joan, use Webgrabber (for Mac).; 10/24/08, 11:11 AM
Ann Althouse said...: "Another great thing about Blogger - and Wordpress is that up till now at least, they've steadfastly refused to police content..."

Google has the size and clout to stand up to intimidation.; 10/24/08, 11:12 AM
Ann Althouse said...: One reason for me to support them is to contribute to the giant effort that supports millions of bloggers around the world who are counting on the survival and clout of this system. It's not just about me. I really appreciate what Blogger has contributed to the world and I don't mind showing it.

BTW, why do you think Dr. Helen is on Blogger?; 10/24/08, 11:14 AM
PatHMV said...: No, Google doesn't censor content. It just lets others with political axes to grind flag blogs (and videos) as spam or "objectionable content," so Google can just blame it on the automation...

And of course, they're not big enough to stand up to censorship in other countries.

Certainly no company is perfect, and there are risks (and benefits) attendant with each option. Thankfully, we have the freedom to choose which risks and benefits we want. For myself, I like "owning" my own domain, and working with a hosting service from which I can easily and regularly download database dumps of our entire archive of posts and comments. Google, of course, has the benefit of a massively distributed architecture, so that the odds of a hardware failure losing your data are almost nil, and your traffic/bandwidth limit is non-existent. But if there are any problems, the odds of you being able to talk to a human being capable of resolving them are slim to none.; 10/24/08, 11:33 AM
AlphaLiberal said...: This seems like the most appropriate place to comment on Ann's comment guidelines:

Why no comment against ad hominem attacks? Are you okay with that? Your site is full of that. I resist and try to stick to issues but get a load of it.

And, I haven't "told" Ann Althouse what to post for a very long time. I do have tangential things to raise or subjects that Ann's right wing base would otherwise not even know about.

The web is a balkanized place and this space is a rare one where we cross paths and have intertribal dialogue.

Sorry, "dialogue."; 10/24/08, 1:03 PM
Mark said...: I lost a domain name when my host/registrar went out of business, and I couldn't make contact with the venture that bought them out (which may, come to think about it, be the same one squatting on Patterico.com....)

Moral of the story: Pay the premium for Network Solutions' Registrar service, use whomever you want as your host, and you don't have to worry about some two-bit operation trying to extort money from you to keep your domain name.; 10/24/08, 1:32 PM
BJM said...: Your url can be hijacked without stealing your domain name. Two blog sites on my Hosting Matters share were hijacked by a p*rn site.

Google cares only about Google's bottom line, their customers are deluded if they think otherwise.; 10/24/08, 3:54 PM
Ann Althouse said...: AlphaLiberal said..."This seems like the most appropriate place to comment on Ann's comment guidelines: Why no comment against ad hominem attacks? Are you okay with that? Your site is full of that."

I have my idiosyncratic standards, and there are a number of things that I will delete. (It's never based on viewpoint or disagreeing with me.) I isolated one particular type of problem simply because it comes up a lot, and people don't seem to realize how bad it is. Also, I wanted to redirect people to the email. I'm happy to get tips and it's a much more effective way to get me to do a separate post.

Anyway, It's free-wheeling around here generally, and I allow people to insult each other if that's what they want to do. I don't recommend it, but sometimes it's amusing get personal and even unreasonable with each other. This isn't the classroom.; 10/24/08, 4:28 PM
blake said...: Google has the size and clout to stand up to intimidation.

And to intimidate.

I find it's generally better to use a service that cares whether you use them or not.

It's not always possible, of course. But I get my computers from a guy who builds them in his garage, for example, rather than Dell or Apple. I don't have many problems, but when I do, I know he's going to fix them.

Lunch is good like that, too. Go someplace where the owner is working behind the counter.

Anyway, Google is slouching toward evil. It'll get there soon enough.; 10/24/08, 4:42 PM