Salon Goes Blogging
from the for-now dept
As has been rumored here and there over the past week or so, Salon has decided to go blogging in a big way. Am I the only one underwhelmed by the offering? They want people to pay them $40/year to blog on their site. Not very compelling. The only benefit appears to be that there will be a single site where you can see who else with a Salon blog has posted recently. It’s not a bad offering, but I don’t see it as being any more special than many other blog sites out there. If anything, Salon should have at least tied the offering to their premium subscribers – so that premium subscribers get a discount on a blog or vice versa. There’s also a question about what happens if Salon goes out of business. Since they’re rumored to only have a few months of cash left, will all those blogs disappear?
Comments on “Salon Goes Blogging”
Radio UserLand
Since they’re using Radio UserLand, all the blog content is kept on individual users’ computers. If Salon folded, they could (with help if necessary) reconfigure Radio to publish their weblogs somewhere else–but if users lose Radio’s data files in a crash etc, their weblog content will be lost (or at least need recovering from the raw HTML).
$40 is also the price for a regular unbranded version of Radio. I’m not sure I’d recommend it to non-technical people, but dealing with other companies is a perk of being an actual company, I guess.
Hosted at UserLand, AFAIK
It looks like the Salon Blogs servers (rcs.salon.com and blogs.salon.com) are located in the same IP range as UserLand’s servers (static*.userland.com, etc).
I had a bit of a look at this when blogs.salon.com was being tested.
Also, the price to run a Salon blog is exactly the same as the price to run a Radio blog (on radio.weblogs.com): I suspect that if Salon folded, UserLand would transfer all the blogs over to radio.weblogs.com for you.
If not, I run the Python Community Server and would be happy to have a few more bloggers hosting there (it’s free, but not as stable as the UserLand servers). Rogers Cadenhead notes that he moved his weblogs from radio.weblogs.com to http://www.pycs.net successfully.
UserLand seems fairly nice about people running multiple blogs on radio.weblogs.com etc. They’re fairly easy-going people in general 🙂