It would be easy to believe this had Google not abandoned Wave, Notebook, messed around with IGoogle, switched things around with Google pages and messed things up with Buzz. Google lately, while still mostly an ad-supported service, is also heading towards more cloud centric models. The more these cloud services mature, the less incentive Google has towards supporting Blogger and with Facebook pages being the rage, I just don't believe Google has much incentive to keep Blogger for long.
-Paul Keith
They have more of an incentive to put more into keeping Blogger going than all the other crap you mentioned, combined. Blogger makes them money...lots of money. The things you mentioned were not profitable at all...not for Google or the users.
A facebook fan page is not a substitute for a website or blog. And you really can't make money on facebook with banner advertising unless you develop your own facebook app that people actually want to use on a daily basis (think games)
Docs can be made public, whatever their next Page/Wave creator would probably have more interactive ad based elements, finally the biggest key would be Google's shift to the mobile market. Once they feel they hit the motherload of contextual mobile ad marketing, I bet they are only going to keep Blogger as to not pissed off current Blogger users and little to no attempt would be made to improve the service until eventually Blogger becomes the next Geocities.
-Paul Keith
None of this is a substitute for having a blog or website either. Blogging will continue to exist and provide Google with a nice income for many years to come. Mobile ads are only good for mobile things that don't work well on the desktop. I don't see the regular internet being replaced by a bunch of tiny pages with minimal scripting made for handheld devices. The regular internet will exist for many years to come and there is still plenty of money to be made in advertising here. Plus, even if what you say does happen and we all throw away our desktop computers and buy a tiny screen mobile device, Blogger can easily be made suitable for those handheld devices with a simple template change...no need to throw the whole thing away. It can still make them (and their users) a ton of money for many years to come.
I haven't tried Entrecard though, only seen it in your blog, but with the fall of services like MyBlogLog - I often wonder whether there's much of a blog community left as it seems outside of professional bloggers, most of the crowd has moved on to Facebook and the result (from my ignorant eyes) is that blogging communities nowadays look more like LinkedIn communities only instead of jobs, it's mostly asking for comments. Hell, it seems Life Journal has more of an active diverse community than individual blogs nowadays.
-Paul Keith
The problem with MyBlogLog was that it was bought by Yahoo, and they kill everything they touch. They didn't develop the site like they should have, expected the features it already had to somehow make them money, and it didn't, so they are shutting it down, like they do with everything else they ruin. If the original developers had sold it to
anybody else, it would have had a greater chance of survival and improvement.
I won't argue with you about the fact that there are plenty of small time bloggers begging for visitors, comments, ad clicks, etc. but you will find that just about everywhere, including facebook.
It's mostly Blogger's date centric look though that's the deal breaker for me. I really wanted this to feel more like a static page and ones that aren't "connected" to the dates on the sidebar. (although most WP.com themes show the date anyway)
-Paul Keith
Then don't use the standard archive widget. Use a link list and labels widgets instead. I did explain that all the widgets on the right sidebar of my example were optional. There are plenty more options than what you saw there.
My ideal though is a free theme that makes a blog look more like a squeeze page but seeing as I don't even know how to make those e-book cover looking images, I probably wouldn't be able to pull off a decent looking squeeze page anyway. Then again, my ideal is probably a professional looking theme that merges both newsletter/blogs/forums and Ning-like start pages for free.
-Paul Keith
I have never seen a squeeze page that didn't look like a bad ebay ad, and I immediately close the tab when I land on one of them. If you want any sort of credibility, stay away from that method of presenting information, especially if you are not selling anything or if you want anyone with more than 2 brain cells to take what you are selling seriously.
As far as advertising though, this isn't the blog I wanted to focus that aspect on. Although, at the same time, I'm still trying to figure out Project Wonderful and I've mostly ignored Adsense altogether. I also don't have an Amazon account so I didn't really get to experiment with how Amazon Associates work. Eventually though, I do intend to implement the full capabilities of your blogs especially as I move to just linking to pdfs and rtfs instead of blogging but I really don't know if that day will come. I mean I wanted to really learn CSS first and then gamble on a domain/Wordpress/CMS/Squeeze Page/List Building/Aweber or whatever Internet Marketers use to make the interface seem the most friendliest to visitors combined with Ruby on Rails and just figure out web design/premium blog frameworks and all that but at the same time, I both don't know the walkthrough for that.
-Paul Keith
It's the text that brings in people from search engines and you won't get that with links to pdfs and rtf files. You would be far better off publishing the content of those files in a blog post than going through the bother of making those files, finding somewhere to upload them, then dropping a link somewhere and expecting magic to happen. (unless you meant that you plan on selling them)
I don't know why you think you have to learn CSS and Ruby to have a blog. Most bloggers I know don't know either one of them. Most bloggers I know can barely copy & paste.
It's one of the big reasons why I wanted to just make this final blog. After this, hopefully I can provide a free blog that would match or rival your blog design and hopefully when that happens I also have knowledge of how to program and host some applications and how to share better content that's free but on a quality scale that rivals paid sites/paid e-books and be my self editor without frustrating readers... but those are all so far away and like I said in that other topic, it's going to take beyond everything I have to even scratch the surface for those knowledge and skills and turning that blog into art and when that happens - if that happens.
-Paul Keith
We had a long talk about this before. If you really like my blog that much, then follow my example.
Don't make things any more complicated than they have to be. Start with the basics...
Set it up anywhere you like that will give you the freedom to grow and profit from your work if you choose to do that in the future (wordpress.com will not do that), choose a good simple template with lots of possibilities (hell, I could even set it up for you with my template on Blogger...the tweaks I did are something to behold in the design control panel)
Hook it up to your friendfeed, twitter, and facebook accounts, so whenever you make a post your followers there will know about it.
Then you just concentrate on writing, whenever the whim strikes. There is no reason why you ever have to plan on abandoning it before you even start it.
As your blog grows, add other things to it, a little at a time, as you can handle it. I'll always be here to help you.
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