UPDATE: Here’s the latest on this from Dave on the “transition plan.”

NEW, IMPROVED UPDATE: God bless the Internet. Waxy.org has put out a challenge for folks to product remixes of Dave’s audio note. Hilarity ensues. This one is the funkiest so far.

ORIGINAL POST: Dave Winer frequently claims to be the first weblogger. As the architect of the RSS XML syndication protocol, organizer of BloggerCon and the founder of Userland, which makes Radio and Manila blog publishing tools, there is no doubt he has had a great impact on the blog trend. He’s also something of a prickly personality who has both many admirers and many critics. The latter camp are certainly on alert with Winer’s recent decision to shut down Weblogs.com as a free web hosting service for some 3,000 sites with this brusque announcement:

I can’t afford to host these sites. I don’t want to start a site hosting business. These are firm, non-negotiable statements.

Winer invited people who have sites hosted on the service to leave a comment on the above entry and that he will export the content of the sites for them to do what they will with the data. In similarly tart style, he wrote at the top of the comments thread:

Groundrules: Personal comments, ad hominems, will be deleted. And no negotiating or whining. Just post the url of your site.

Winer does provide considerably more perspective about his decision in a separate audio essay, in which he explains, among other things, the stress of keeping the servers going out of his own pocket is taxing his health (he suffered a heart attack a couple of years ago). Doc Searls, one of the most prominent webloggers who still uses the Weblogs.com domain, also offers his thoughts on this development, which is basically forgiving (Doc is a really nice guy).

This sorry episode just goes to show the liability in using a free host for a blog or other kind of web site, all the more so if it’s a “business blog.” Recently I wrote to someone who pointed to their blog as an example of a business blog for inclusion in my directory, and when I noticed it was a Blogspot blog, I wrote back saying that it looked unprofessional as a business blog, in my opinion, to be hosted on Blogspot, akin to hosting a business site on Geocities some years ago. I doubt Google would abandon its million-plus users of the Blogspot system as uncerimoniously as Winer has done with Weblogs.com, but you never know. Me, I’m happier paying a real host with a track record and business model and cash flow, where I have a greater confidence the data still will be there tomorrow.

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