Of Marginal Value
In 2005 when I first tested out blogger, it offered users the option of posting their blog content to their domain via ftp However, they have withdrawn that option. They have substituted custom domains, which lets you maintain a blog under a "personal" domain name, but even assuming that the content you created draws hits, those page views are not associated with your business domain.
You may achieve some secondary benefit if you can get viewers to click through to your business, but one of the primary reasons to work at creating interesting content has been removed. The content is not on your site and your creative efforts have only split the "hits", not contributed to your business presence. This reduces the value of blogger as a business tool.
Google notes that the number of people who publish via FTP is small, so the lack of those sites is probably unimportant to them. Businesses wanting to use a blog will simply use one of the other tools, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, or one of the other web-based publishing systems that have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain.
And in the end, blogger has served to advance the web. Blogs are no longer the domain of the tech savvy, but are common, and freely accessible to any and all who want to try them. What is important is that open publishing is available to anyone with something important to say, (without having to go through the tightly controlled access of major news organizations and publishing houses). That is a revolution in itself.
Perhaps the idea wasn't about business after all, but about freedom of speech. And that is enough to justify public appreciation of the tool.
For those who have no blogspot blog, the announcement is below.
"Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs...remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that.
...Three years ago we launched Custom Domains[2] to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year's post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP[3] and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing.
For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010."
You may achieve some secondary benefit if you can get viewers to click through to your business, but one of the primary reasons to work at creating interesting content has been removed. The content is not on your site and your creative efforts have only split the "hits", not contributed to your business presence. This reduces the value of blogger as a business tool.
Google notes that the number of people who publish via FTP is small, so the lack of those sites is probably unimportant to them. Businesses wanting to use a blog will simply use one of the other tools, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, or one of the other web-based publishing systems that have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain.
And in the end, blogger has served to advance the web. Blogs are no longer the domain of the tech savvy, but are common, and freely accessible to any and all who want to try them. What is important is that open publishing is available to anyone with something important to say, (without having to go through the tightly controlled access of major news organizations and publishing houses). That is a revolution in itself.
Perhaps the idea wasn't about business after all, but about freedom of speech. And that is enough to justify public appreciation of the tool.
For those who have no blogspot blog, the announcement is below.
"Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs...remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that.
...Three years ago we launched Custom Domains[2] to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year's post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP[3] and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing.
For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010."
posted by jbell
at
10:10 AM
