Blog Posts

My take on the blog.ch sell-out

by ,
12.03.2006 12:05 CEST - Comments [9]

In short: It's just a freaking domain :)

(If you don't know, what I'm talking about, read this and this )

blog.ch played certainly an important part in bringing the swiss bloggers together, but nowadays it's neither unique nor very innovative. slug.ch, list.blogug.ch and planet.blogug.ch are already replacing the aggregator features of blog.ch with more features, more blogs and also a more open approach.

Sure, Matthias' posts about blogging are most of the time interesting and I do hope, he continuous in doing so. But with the introduction of the blogch tag (search on the Planet), a more decentralized and distributed discussion about the swiss blogosphere will hopefully emerge.

So, if Matthias wants to sell blog.ch to some commercial entity, so be it. It's his domain, he invested a lot of time in it and he can do with it, whatever he wants. Whatever happens with blog.ch, alternatives are already here and I'm sure, the community will do the needed promotion, if necessary. And it's not that one automatically types in "blog.ch", just because he wants to know something about blogs in switzerland (and never heard of blog.ch before). The rest is solvable by linking, mouth-to-mouth (or blog-to-blog :) ) propaganda and the inevitable PageRank. If blog.ch becomes "bad" (and that doesn't necessarily have to happen, even if it will be "commercial"), it's really just a tiny short-term problem for the community.

Lots of people suggested also, that blogug.ch should take over blog.ch. Sure, not a bad idea, which I'm definitively not against, but as I said, it's just a domain ...

And all the talk about "Doing a blog Verein" etc... FCS, why do we always need a "Verein" for each and everything. blogug.ch for example as it is now, works pretty well, I do the planet, ping and top100, Patrice does the stats and list and Alain owns the domain, provides the DNS services and the gallery. Each on his own server. And everyone is welcome to contribute, come up with new ideas and gets his own subdomain. I don't see, how a "Verein" would help here, besides having to invest a lot of time into the "legal stuff". But maybe I'm just too used to work on loosely coupled communities, which do work together as it fits and it works fine most of the time (The PHP community for example still has no "Foundation" or whatsoever).

To sum up: blog.ch has a hard time keeping up with the newly emerging alternatives and without any major overhaul (or cooperation) would be getting more and more obsolete anyway. So it's the right time for Matthias to sell it now, before his zenith is way behind him :) I wish Matthias much luck, hope he will find more time for his family in the future and thanks for all the work he did for the Swiss blog community (and sincerely hope, he won't disappear completely)

Update: kblog has a long post about, why blog.ch should be a "Verein". I understand his reasoning, but still don't agree :)

Tags:
Related Entries:
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- High resolution map of latest Swiss blog posts
- blogug in today's "heute"
- blog.ch sold
- Swiss Blogosphere Tagging Experiment
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Comments [9]

Matthias, 12.03.2006 13:25 CEST

Short stats question: How many of the blogs in list.blogug.ch are imported from my daily updated OPML file?

red, 12.03.2006 15:02 CEST

Chregu: I totally agree, there is no need for a 'Verein'. I see so many community-solutions which just work...

Matthias: Well, so just cut these exports and see what will happen. Remember why list.blogug.ch was brought to life?

chregu, 12.03.2006 15:05 CEST

Matthias: No idea, you have to ask Patrice :)

chregu, 12.03.2006 15:12 CEST

One addition more: I didn't want to say, that Matthias with blog.ch isn't still doing a good job or isn't a great starting place. My main point mainly was, that if blog.ch isn't that "cool" anymore, there are already alternatives out there which easily can fill that gap and the Swiss blogging community won't be "homeless" :)

kblog, 12.03.2006 15:49 CEST

*laugh* Still not see? Well, I must admit that because I studied law for some semesters, I got teached that you never should trust anyone too much.

However, like gebsn - a lawyer himself - wrote a comment into my blog, a "einfache Gesellschaft" is created very fast and easily - but like I discribed, it's a quite dangerous form of organisation.

@red: yes that is true, there are many comunity-solutions that just work. But I've read too much about such organisations that members wished to had have an association because they had to pay themselfes - and not too few. Its just like: why didn't I sign an insurance for it?

Matthias, 12.03.2006 16:11 CEST

red, your hostility is unwarranted. I have been working with blogug for several months now; I gave input when the service was created, I have an admin account, blogug has "my" list of blogs, they have my database and made the statistics with it, I have advertised the service on my site several times. So what's your problem?

Chregu, blogug currently has 1192 blogs listed. I did a bit of comparison. My script still ain't perfect, a lot of duplicates are not caught, but I think something between 200 and 250 blogs in blogug.ch are not in blog.ch.
It might be people signed up at both places at once, so we don't know that all the other ~950-1000 blogs are from blog.ch. Perhaps Patrice kept track of it; otherwise we'll never know :-).

Patrice, 12.03.2006 19:34 CEST

The vast majority of the weblogs have been imported from blog.ch. Of new additions probably about 80% come from blog.ch. I don't keep track of that in the database, though.

The Technorati tag "Helvetia" has so far only contributed one weblog, by the way (Steph's Cheese Sandwich Blog).

leo, 14.03.2006 00:00 CEST

Sorry, to lazy to write english, so my thougths in german: Der Bürokratieaufwand eines Vereins ist ja nicht sooo Wahnsinnig gross und gibt eine gewisse Rechtssicherheit.

Natürlich sind wir ja alle nette Menschen, aber manchmal ändert das (natürlich nicht bei uns aber eben bei den andern). Natürlich würde Alain auf blogug.ch nie eine p0rn-Seite mit vielen Google-Ads aufmachen, natürlich würde Chregu seine App's nie Closed Source machen, natürlich würde sis nie für sein Design plötzlich Geld verlangen, etc.

Aber wenn sowas passieren würden währen wir natürlich eine Erfahrung reicher, nur währe es dann auch zu spät. Besonders wenn es dann um die doch ganz nette Domain "blog.ch" geht. Nichts desto trotz ist die Domain natürlich bei MIR am besten aufgehoben und mein Angebot kommt bestimmt noch ;-)

@leo's, 15.03.2006 20:43 CEST (Trackback)

Wie ihr sicherlich alle wisst verkauft Matthias blog.ch. Irgendwie schade das sich der Vater aller schweizer Blogaggregatoren nun aus dem Business verabschiedet.Nun aber so sei es und deshalb kaufe ic ...

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