The battle for the blogosphere

Until recently, most providers of blogging software and services were relatively small startup companies, but now big-footed competitors are joining them, changing the dynamics and philosophies of the so-called blogosphere.

As heavy entrants such as Microsoft stomp into blogging with groundshaking steps, the question is whether the changes they are bringing will be benefitial or detrimental to the market.

Blogging is a medium whose skyrocketing popularity in both the consumer and enterprise spaces is widely credited with how simple and easy it made publishing text on the Web. Already, however, Microsoft has single-handedly introduced what many consider a significant variation to the original stripped-down approach to blogging with its MSN Spaces service.

Blogging services and software traditionally have provided a simple core functionality for creating online journals easily. These services generally are built on open platforms so that users, if interested, can add extra features to their blogs and integrate them with third-party services to add capabilities.

However, with MSN Spaces, Microsoft is delivering a pre-set suite of blogging and complementary services on a platform that doesn't allow for much manual tweaking and extension on the part of the end-user.

"There are two big buckets in blogging services. There are those built on open standards and meant to be publishing platforms. The beauty of those products is that they allow a lot of customization by the end-user," says Allen Weiner, a Gartner analyst.

"At the other end of the spectrum is the Microsoft approach, which is blogging services that are quite connected to e-mail, instant messaging, photos, music, and the like. Blogging is just one element of the overall experience, and they are more restrictive and harder to customize," Weiner adds.

Introduced in beta form just last December, MSN Spaces now hosts over 10 million blogs, an eye-popping adoption rate that has blown past internal Microsoft expectations. "MSN Spaces is the fastest growing service MSN has ever introduced," said Brooke Richardson, lead product manager at MSN communication services.

The significant thing for the blogging market is that Microsoft is doing it its way, designing MSN Spaces to have a central text-blogging core but complemented by and integrated with a suite of MSN online services, such as instant messaging, e-mail, music playlist posting, and photo sharing. Microsoft also built into the service access control features to let users determine who can view their blogs, although they can make their blogs totally open if they want. MSN Spaces will also notify users when blogs from friends have been updated.

In March, Yahoo introduced in limited beta a service called Yahoo 360 whose concept and design are similar to MSN Spaces. This service comes as no surprise, because Yahoo, like Microsoft's MSN, has a wide variety of online services with which to surround its blogging service. As two leading Web portals, MSN and Yahoo have an amount and variety of online services under one roof that few others can rival, and blogging is something they're weaving into their overall fabric.

This clashes with the philosophy of most original blogging services, including Blogger, which Google acquired in 2003 after it had become popular. Services such as Blogger offer basic blogging functionality but also tend to be open, flexible platforms that tech-savvy users can extend, build upon, and integrate with third-party services.