You Know It's Bad If The Situation Of The Economy Actually Has Some Effect On Your Life
Oh sure, we're in a recession. Okay, whatever.
Well, anyone who has been watching the Internet for the past year or so, knows that we have been heading that way for a while. Ad companies don't give people as much money as they originally did, because they aren't making as much money as they originally did.
All this free stuff is great, for the consumer.
If you had to pay for your blog to keep it, would you? I think, unless the price was horribly high, I would pay to keep it. I like blogging too much to give it up now. I hope it won't come to that, but if it did, I would pay.
Other places are beginning to charge their services.
For example,
Bluemountain now charges for everything except rinky dink "Everyday" cards. As they said,
"Times are changing, and so are we." What? It's only $15.95/year, for a service that used to be totally free. Eh, that's fine with me (kind of). I don't use Bluemountain much anyway. But it did happen to be a fun, easy and
safe way of sending Christmas cards and whatnot.
Fan Forum or Forums For Fans, as it is called now, is now threatening blackouts if people don't donate money. They also have
this thing where they can put little hands with a number of how many times you've donated, on your all of your posts. And soon, if you don't donate anything, you don't get to go to certain areas of the site.
And now
this. It's not the same thing, but then again, maybe it is.
Blogger needs bandwidth, and is asking for help. I love Blogger, and if I had some extra bandwidth, or even knew what it was, I would give some in a second. This call is out to web hosts or people who own/run their own servers. So, that puts me out right there.
My point is, those sorts of things seem to escalating. Maybe, someday in the not so distant future, we'll think lovingly back on those days when everything on the Internet was free.
Hopefully, that time has not yet come yet.
posted by Val at 12/11/2001 04:27:00 PM
