The battle for the blogosphere

Microsoft's MSN Spaces threatens to dominate with formal toolsets while others, like Blogger, hope to keep the technology's pioneering spirit alive.

"I personally get a little overwhelmed when there are so many things to choose from, and so many different fields, and it's so loud, and it's asking me so many different questions at once," says Biz Stone, Blogger senior specialist.

"I got into blogging because it was this blank box and I could type a thought into there and press a button. For me that's almost enough," Stone adds.

For example, Blogger to date has no native way for users to control access to their blogs, nor does it feature native image uploading, two capabilities core to MSN Spaces and Yahoo 360.

"Once you create [an access controlled] blog and you bring your instant messaging and music playlist and pictures into it, you wind up with something that is very powerful but that I would argue is not a blog," says Gartner's Weiner. "I would call it a community content site, and it will be extremely popular, but it is definitely a variant" on the conventional blog concept.

In April, when MSN Spaces exited its beta period, it was already among the most popular blogging sites in the U.S. based on stats indicating 2.87 million unique visitors, according to market researcher comScore Networks.

MSN Spaces was topped only by blogging stalwarts. Google's Blogger and its accompanying Blogspot hosting site together drew 12.63 million unique visitors, followed by Six Apart's Typepad and LiveJournal services, which together rang up 11.47 million, and by Xanga.com with 8.26 million.

Microsoft makes no apologies for adopting a different approach. "When you thought of a blogger a year ago, it was someone writing a blog that they wanted to disseminate to anyone in the entire world. Now we're seeing blogging entering the more mainstream consumer space, and people are using it to share with a closer, tighter circle of people," MSN's Richardson says.

Surrounding MSN Spaces natively with a variety of vehicles to share and communicate with others helps draw people who may have avoided blogging out of fear it would require them to generate a large amount of text to post on a daily basis, Richardson said.

The tradeoff for services such as MSN Spaces that come with native integration of a variety of features and capabilities is that they can be less flexible and extensible than a service such as Blogger.

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.

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.