why i use blogger

by tony pierce, 111

if i ever invent something i would want people to use it.

id be pissed if they used a knock off version. especially if my version was free and constantly being updated for free.

and especially if i was cool about my product and always tried to keep it working well.

most of you kids are too young to remember when netscape came out. it was the first web browser that kicked ass. in my opinion.

this was before the dot com boom it was before everything. i think television had pretty much just been invented and Netscape showed up with a browser that was capable of letting you do background colors. it was amazing.

people said, how can they make any money giving this browser away for free? will it work long-term? what will happen when Microsoft comes out with a browser?

for a while Netscape dominated the field and most people used it and when Internet Explorer came out it was clunky and bad and people rejoiced for the little Northern California company cuz they proved that Microsoft couldnt kick everyones ass at everything.

And Netscape went public one day and it opened at $35 and it closed at $75 and even though none of us were rich enough to buy any shares we all were so happy for them for providing a great product, fighting off Bill Gates, and making their money through investment instead of through charging their customers.

As time went on they kept making improvements and it wasnt until Microsoft started to cheat did things start to fade. And then of course AOL bought Netscape and everything went to shit.

When Blogger came out they reminded me a lot of Netscape. They were this Up North company of pasty white boys and girls who had a simple little product that worked most of the time. It was a little more complex than Netscape cuz you needed servers to do shit and they needed to constantly update their technology, but for the most part it was free and easy and did what it said it would do. It helped you blog.

As you know I was lucky. I started blogging in August of 2001 and in September, right after the terrorist activity, my blog started to get serious traffic on account of my photo essays that emptied out onto the busblog, and ever since then I had a “popular” blog.

Besides the loyalty thing, one reason that I have always wanted to stay with Blogger is because I want to show people that you dont need any fancy software, you dont have to host your own shit, you dont need great design, you dont need friends in high places, and you dont need to write about politics or sports or sex or anything other than what you want to write about and you could still get hits.

I could very easilly have 3-4 designers re-do this bad boy and make it look 1029346132 times better than it looks right now. I could have ads, I could get MT and have categories, I could trackback on comments, I could do tons of shit. But I dont want to because I want everyone to know that you dont need to do that to be “popular”.

all you need to do is rock

and do it every fucking day.

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raymi + splink + anti

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