Weblogs.com Rises From the Flames

Dave Winer is doing a little wining of his own. What was heralded as the death of the blogosphere when Dave shut down free blog host Weblogs.com turned out to be little more than a four-day server outage surrounded by one heck of a flame war.

While nasty comments zipped around the Web after the unexpected June 13 announcement that four years of free hosting was at an end for 3,000-plus blogs, computer book author Rogers Cadenhead was working with Winer on a solution.

He bought a server for $500 and downloaded the Manila content-management software needed to run the blogs that had been housed on Weblogs.com, which started life as a free blog-starter service and community offered by UserLand. Winer transferred the data, and by June 17 new blog community Buzzword.com was up and running with free hosting guaranteed through Sept. 18. The Weblogs.com addresses will be redirected from Winer’s server to the identical subdomain at Buzzword.com for that same period.

Faced with a mix of technical challenges and personal issues including health concerns and a household move this month, Winer simply stopped the service and promised backups by July 1.

“I was in the middle of an emergency and my services melted down. I promised the most I could, and I planned to exceed the promise,” Winer said. “I’ve heard from thousands of people who wanted to help.” More at Wired News