Tuesday, February 03, 2009

Paying for 2.0

More and more media outlets are starting to think seriously about the disappearance of new media forms with shaky business models. The blogging network Pajamas Media shut down, there's no saying others won't too.

So we have to ask ourselves: how much would you pay for a given 2.0 form for a year? I already donated money to Wikipedia. I pay monthly for LinkedIn already (should probably try to expense it). Would I pay a hundred bucks a year for Facebook? Without blinking. $250? I'd pay it. Compare with the three grand a year I pay Verizon now for the three cell phones and the Triple Play.* Or the $200 I pay for Netflix.

But without Blogger/Blogspot I'd be toast. I've got 1500 posts up on this bitch, and there's no hint that they'll let me export it to a *.csv or something. There's no way Google could figure out how to load balance the millions of people who might try to extract at peak times. It's just too much of a technical challenge for such a frail company of technical and business bleating morons. Way over Google's head.


*I'd ditch cable if it weren't for the Fox Soccer Channel, truth be told

2 comments:

Jon Moore said...

If you are worried about export, one method would be to make sure you are exporting full articles in your blog feed; then you can pretty much get all the raw HTML out for all the articles by iterating over the pages of the feed.

Jon Moore said...

Here's the Python script I wrote to help out the Grouse.