3/30/2005

Unhappy Blogger

I apologize for not including a link to this post, but I feel strong enough about the poor service blogger.com is able to provide to exit the normal posting procedure. Admittedly I have been a short-term consumer to the web-site recently joining only to achieve school credit. In the little time I have had to get to know and use the web-site I have encountered many problems. Including but not limited to the invitation process, the posting of a blog, the commenting on a blog, and even the logging on to Tufte’s Economics Class Blog page. (Even when it does work it takes forever!) Truly and in all honesty I have spent more time fighting the web-site errors than actually participating in online blogging. I hope mine is an extraordinary case but I have a feeling this problem is more universal. The persisting problem demonstrates the economic paradox of scarce resources. As a company time after time wastes their customer’s scarce resource of time, their customers begin to look elsewhere for service. Had this been a free market setting not a monopolistic, I would have long ago looked past blogger.com for a different blogging service provider. ):

3 comments:

heat said...

I thought I should share my feelings on this matter because, for the record, I have actually found my experience with blogger.com to be quite positive. I think that it has been a great medium to hear other students thoughts and comments. It is crappy that others have had such problems with the website, I guess I'll consider myself one of the lucky ones.

Dr. Tufte said...

I'm glad someone brought this up - I won't penalize anyone for spelling or grammar on this one.

I'm not always very happy with Blogger. I'm sitting here doing this on Sunday evening because I know I won't have connection problems.

But, Blogger is free. This makes it really easy for me to justify using this service with students (my own blog is on pay site that I cover with advertising - and it's always fast). I get quite a bit of flack about Aplia, and I have much more confidence that it helps you with this class than blogging does.

The economics of Blogger are typical for software. Because marginal cost is so low, so are prices. But this doesn't generate much cash to make needed improvements.

In Blogger's defense, most of the reasons for slowness is that blogging is popular. Server-side blogging companies are adding capacity constantly, and are having trouble keeping up.

As to switching to another service, I don't have much to go on. Blogger is a division of Google, so I'm guessing that they are more adept at solving these problems than others. I am open to suggestions.

One thing I can tell you is that connection speed is not much of an issue. I used to use dial-up from home, and the weak link in the chain is definitely the response from Blogger on the other end.

Here's a suggestion that will get me in a lot of trouble. All of this can be addressed by getting SUU to buy a server version of blogging software (like Moveable Type). Most universities are going this way. On this campus, there aren't enough people kicking and screaming to get that sort of investment. The person to contact about this is Glenn Pryor (pryor@suu.edu). Send him an e-mail, tell him whether or not you think what we do in this class with Blogger is worthwhile, tell him that the free service isn't cutting it, and tell him that I said that this is a service that SUU should provide (like e-mail, browsers, and Office).

Anonymous said...

Dr. Tufte said:

"As to switching to another service, I don't have much to go on. Blogger is a division of Google, so I'm guessing that they are more adept at solving these problems than others."

It's now a couple years later since the original post, and I think the site works fine. I haven't ever had a problem posting or commenting. Google must have fixed whatever bugs there were. Perhaps someone at Google saw this blog and did something about it!