> I'm on Blogger so I don't have those stats. Only number I have comes
> from FeedBurner.

And here's where I insert my rant on free vs. fee services (not directed at
you personally Taylor, but at the entire principle ;)

Nothing about free services is truly free. Free means your are exchanging
something other than money for a good or service. Free might mean viewing an
advertisement. Free might mean giving up certain rights to your content or
privacy. Or in the case of online services, free means giving up quality of
service guarantees and access to information. 

When your free blog hosting provider goes down, you don't have a legitimate
complaint about quality of service because you didn't trade anything for a
guarantee of 99.9999% uptime. When your free download hosting service meters
your bandwidth because CNN linked to your news story, you don't have a
legitimate complaint because you didn't trade anything for a guarantee of a
certain amount of network access. When you want access to statistics about
how many downloads you generate or how many people are visiting your site,
you don't have a legitimate complaint because the traffic ultimately belongs
to whoever is providing the bandwidth and Web presence where you are
currently displaying your content. When Apple chooses not to disclose
download stats to podcasters/video bloggers who get free access to 25
million+ desktops, you don't have a legitimate complaint because everyone
who gets access to traffic statistics is paying to be there.

Even if you sign a contract with a free service to provide you a certain
level of service, they aren't bound by those terms and may change them at
any time because you didn't provide any consideration for the contract. 

What free services do provide is a way to get your message out when you
can't afford the alternative. You are trading the opportunity cost of
guaranteed levels of service and information access for the ability to have
no barrier to entry for distribution. When things like QoS and data mining
become important, it's time to open the wallet and purchase that level of
access (which for most people is about the same price as a cable
subscription).

Jake Ludington

http://www.mediablab.com
http://www.podcastingstarterkit.com




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