Red Rag

Full marks to Six Apart. After many users (including me) bagged them for setting unrealistic and unexpected limits on new versions of their software, they appear to have addressed pretty much all of the major concerns.

The personal edition will now allow up to five authors and unlimited blogs, for a cost of $70. For $100 (which was to be the regular price of a personal license), you can set up unlimited blogs with unlimited authors. That’s a pretty good improvement, although probably still beyond my budget.

They’ve also given some indication as to the future of the price scheme — minor updates will be free, and existing users will get a discount on major releases. While a lot of the anger about MT3 was caused by an unexpected change in direction that took the community by surprise, I don’t think Six Apart will be dumb enough to do that again.

So that’s good news for one blogging community. Unfortunately, Dave Winer announced some infinitely worse news for the weblogs.com community: he took down all of their blogs, with no warning. Having suffered the occasional database drama, I know just how frightening it is to be confronted by the possibility of losing years’ worth of posts. Giving his users a couple of weeks notice so that they would have the opportunity to back up their site and move elsewhere, rather than log on to an abrupt eviction notice, is not “company-type service”, it’s plain old good manners.

People don’t expect something for nothing, but they do expect to be treated with courtesy.

(Links via VM.)