The battle for the blogosphere

After MSN Space's debut in December, Microsoft's most famous corporate blogger, Robert Scoble, greeted the service warmly but famously posted on his blog all the reasons why it wasn't a service for him, which in essence boiled down to customization constraints.

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Failing to win over sophisticated and tech-savvy bloggers such as Scoble, a Microsoft technology evangelist, is a tradeoff that Microsoft is happy to make, at least for now. Providing a rich sharing experience that includes not only text but also photos, playlists, access control, instant messaging and e-mail in a single, integrated, easy to use, out-of-box type of way is paying off for MSN Spaces, Richardson said. "At this growth rate, we could become the largest blogging service in the near future," she said. Microsoft is tapping mostly people who haven't blogged before, and specifically among the ranks of MSN Messenger users, she said.

Standing in the middle between the MSN Spaces and the Blogger approach is Six Apart. The San Francisco company's Typepad caters to conventional bloggers interested in publishing and reaching an unlimited number of readers, whereas its LiveJournal service, which it acquired this year, appeals to bloggers who want to communicate with a limited sphere of friends and thus seek a service with tight, very granular access control to individual blogs. Six Apart also has a sophisticated software blogging platform called Moveable Type designed for companies, developers, and organizations.

"We have offerings for all bloggers right now. We cover every base in the market right now," says Mena Trott, Six Apart's president and co-founder.

Six Apart acquired LiveJournal to diversify and broaden the company's user base, she says. LiveJournal's user base is about 70 percent female and about 70 percent under age 21. Typepad's demographic is split equally among men and women who are on average in their early 30s, she says.

Ultimately, the consensus is that the shift in blogging from new services such as MSN Spaces and Yahoo 360 will not have a negative effect on the market because it is attracting new users, and that can only be good for everybody.

"It's great for the entire space as a whole. The more of those services there are, the more connections people are making online," says Blogger's Stone.

"We definitely welcome it because it brings more people to blogging and helps expose blogging to a larger audience, so that helps us because more people will realize they'll want to use our products," says Six Apart's Trott. "We're heavily influencing what they put in their services, so in terms of innovation we're not too scared about that."