Dave Winer has closed up what may be several thousand weblogs hosted at weblogs.com, a pioneer weblogging service. Dave has announced he’ll package up the shuttered sites in importable form, if owners ask him before July 1.

Dave’s audio blog post explains why he had to do this and had to do it without warning anyone. People in the comments are being appropriately appreciative for the years of service Dave gave them, but, wow, it’s a shock.

We could use a page that lists the new homes for the old sites as they are rebuilt….

I’m being urged in private and public to flame Dave. I’m going to try to be fair instead.

The urge to flame comes in part from the pain that shuttering a weblog service causes. Yes, I think I do understand what it would be like to wake up one morning and find my site has been closed. I’d be angry to the point of depression. If it were a commercial service, I’d understand that, well, shit happens. Shit happens to non-commercial sites also.

I assume we agree that it’s Dave’s right to close up the service, and I assume we agree he’s to be thanked for providing the service for so long. And he’s promising to provide all the contents to the owners, something commercial sites don’t always do when they go belly up. Which leaves only a few questions about whether the urge to flame is merited or if it comes from displaced anger at the closing of weblogs.com or at Dave himself.

First, why was the closing so sudden? The transition for the bloggers and the readers would have been far smoother and less painful if they had been warned. Dave’s point in his audio blog is that the transition wouldn’t have been smooth from the host’s point of view, and that a sudden cut-off was necessary. I am not expert enough either in the difficulties of hosting a large site or in Dave’s medical problems to disagree with him.

Second, why the two week wait? That’s going to be painful for the thousands of bloggers, many of whom are my friends. Again, I assume that Dave is correctly estimating the amount of work it will take to package up several thousand sites. If I thought he were either incompetent or making people wait out of meanness, I’d flame him.

Third, is Dave doing enough to ease the transition? I’d love to see weblogs.com redirect readers to the blogs’ new homes for some reasonable period and then post a permanent list of those new homes. Beyond that, I’m not hearing a lot of suggestions, but I hope Dave will act on the reasonable ones. I also hope that he will accept reasonable offers of help. (I also think it’d help for Dave to explicitly guarantee that you’ll get your blog’s contents even if you flame him.)

To my friends who are now without homes for their blog: I am really sorry. I’ll miss your voices for the next couple of weeks. And I’m sure we’ll all update our sites as soon as you have new addresses. It’s not hard to imagine my way into your pain. I just don’t think it helps to transform that pain into flames.

Dave seems to be engaged this morning in the comments to this entry…

Photo Matt has an idea about how to handle the redirects. I can’t evaluate its technical merits, of course, but it sounds promising to the likes of me…

Jeneane has transcribed Dave’s audio message.

December 22, 2004. Dave emphatically believes that my posting above is factually wrong. Dave says, “I couldn’t have warned people.” From our correspondence, this was because many of the email addresses of the affected bloggers were 4 years old and broken. Any implication of mine that Dave could have reached everyone by email is certainly wrong and was not my intention. I meant that it seems to me that, in this stressful and complex situation, it would have been helpful if Dave had notified the people he could have, via email or other Net means. There was no way he could have reached everyone. (Dave recommends the second Wired article on the topic for the true story.)

Categories: Uncategorized dw