Welcome to the Infrablog
Our Vision for Weblogs.com
First, we want to see weblogs.com remain what it is, and maintain how it works for the long term. There’s enormous value for the ecosystem in realizing Dave’s original vision for his ping server: a free, standards-based service that is easy to use, and effective in signaling to the world at large that you’ve submitted new content into the system. Here are some attributes that we intend to preserve and extend for weblogs.com:
1. Free
Basic pings, the messages processed by weblogs.com, will remain free to submit, and free to retrieve from the service. Over time, we plan to offer value-added services to publishers and consumers that we can charge a fee for, in much the same way companies like Yahoo! provide basic email services for free, and offer premium “upgrades” for a fee (e.g. extra storage, domain hosting, integrated website, etc.) But pings will remain free; our goal is to make weblogs.com the best, most widely used ping server available.
2. Open
We are strong believers in standards and open computing. We’ll keep the XML-RPC format Dave Winer built weblogs.com around, and add to it, with additional services that leverage and extend the usefulness of pings. In all cases, we endorse open formats, freely available, freely implementable by the rest of the community. Competing services are a good thing – ultimately they will provide a much stronger basis for innovation and growth in the ecosystem. We want to excel in our execution and implementation of our services, rather than building a walled garden around a proprietary platform.
3. Solid
We have the skills, resources and experience in highly-scaled, high-performance infrastructure to deploy ping server services that will serve the blogosphere (and beyond) for the next stages of growth. As latency and accuracy become increasingly important issues for the blogosphere, weblogs.com will provide a reliable “dial-tone” for sending and receiving publishing signals on the Internet. Like other high quality infrastructure, we expect that over time pings and related services from VeriSign will become transparent – it just works, so often and so well that you won’t give it much thought in the future.
4. Informative
I know from talking to Dave Winer that this was part of his vision, if not part of his current implementation, but we would like to make weblogs.com – the website – a useful destination for checking in on the infrastructure side of the blogosphere. We anticipate it being a handy place to check in for aggregated metrics: how many pings were processed today? How many feeds are active in the last week? How many different languages are being used for ping submission? There’s a great number of stats and measurements we can deliver that we’d find useful as members of the blogosphere. We think you will too.
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