Blog Platforms Locking People In
One of the concepts Cory Doctorow discussed during his recent presentation at Harvard is how developers often create products that lock users in so leaving is very difficult, if not impossible. At dim sum with the bloggers today, we talked a little bit about how it seems that blog platforms still don’t have easy ways to import and export content between systems. While the reasons for this seem obvious, it also has the downside of not making it easy for established bloggers to move to a different platform. Many of us don’t want to leave our data behind or be responsible for maintaining various sites with bits and pieces of our blogging identity all over the Web. Developers could be losing a number of customers because of their interest in locking customers in.
February 27th, 2006 at 8:48 pm
The fact that MovableType has an text-based import/export system was one the things that really attracted me when I moved to it. Of couse, now that I have some 1,700 entries, I’m not sure how practical moving to another system would be, anyway…
February 28th, 2006 at 11:20 am
I just saw (on lifehacker, maybe?) something about a company that will read all old tax software formats and re-gen your paper forms from your DOS-only tax package.
I suspect there’s a market there in all sorts of data fields, including blogs.
In the export-only direction, I really like ljbook for LJ.