And, yep, my posts since last Friday are still up. Are yours?
Yes, I am being a little catty.
However, a few bloggers have mocked my Blogger account as being unprofessional, that Blogger is not worthy of being a blog platform for companies, and that I (and others) need to switch to Six Apart / Typepad. Well, sorry - but when you establish a URL, you should drop it because of peer pressure? Ha.
Um, no thank you. If I were to switch, it would be to Wordpress, but I do not see that happening soon.
How's your blogging going today? Having withdrawals like a junkie? Wishing you were on Wordpress or Blogger right about now? I can see some people pulling out the rest of their hair today.
This is a bigger PR issue than 6A's mishandling of customer relations last time around - geez, I wonder how much discounting they will be doling out this time around - and I think it is on par with the deathmatch at Les Blogs.
If this does not get fixed, the Yahoo deal is going to seem like a kick in the groin for Yahoo, and 6A is going to need to go into full crisis mode. This is going to go beyond bloggers, and reach mainstream press, and likely be spun as the unreliability of blogging technology ... and let's not even talk about the miffed journalists or miffed VCs ...
Maybe 6A should be less worried about civility and European conferences, and spend time and money on scalability. Om has a good post on Web 2.0 outages ... and I doubt this is going to be the last outage for such companies. Shoestringing begats shoestrings.
Update: Forbes has an article on Typepad being down, and now I am just amused. First, once again, they did not notify customers on the problem - come on people, how hard is it to change the homepage to include notices?
Second, something about the line "The shutdown occurred late Thursday night as Six Apart was increasing redundancy on its disk storage" reminds me of the time a company lost a bunch of photos during an upgrade/redundancy issue. Just a hunch, but wondering if all the "missing" posts will be recovered.
Technorati Tags:
PR
public relations
communications
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crisis communications
sixapart
Thoughts on "communications, marketing, public relations and social media."
90 days and counting - guess the question. Talk about a smack in the nuts.
ReplyDeleteMissing posts are missing no more. But I had mine backed up anyway, thankfully. And I have to say, as a happily former Blogger-ette, even with the recent issues I'd still take TypePad any day. I do hope they're taking notes, though.
ReplyDelete"First, once again, they did not notify customers on the problem - come on people, how hard is it to change the homepage to include notices?"
ReplyDeleteThree blog posts, countless updates to our status page, and a dozen mainstream media stories doesn't count as notice? What did you get when your blog was down? I'd link to the downtime message for the other platform you mentioned.... except there isn't one.
We are working hard to make things right with our TypePad community, but inaccurate or misleading statements don't help other bloggers get back on their feet or increase your credibility. I'd welcome any suggestions you have in your area of expertise as to how we can improve what we're doing. And I'm eager and glad to talk to any of our customers to apologize, explain the situation, and outline what we're doing in the future.
But I do have to take issue with your assesment of the situation, especially considering how you've conflated a number of different technology platforms, announcements, and events into a story that doesn't really reflect what TypePad users themselves are saying. I hope you'll take a chance to look at people who have firsthand information and see if it doesn't impact your assessment.
Anil, I have a blog on your platform, and when I went to check it out, there was no message on the control panel. I might have missed it, I will give you that, but I would hope that it would be a big notice, something that I would notice even if I wasn't looking for it. I noticed nothing there ... nor did I receive an email (not the first time around, nor this time) that there were problems. Yes, I think that is a massive communications failure. Yes, everyone loves RSS and blogs, but I did just check to see if my email is part of the control panel - it is, and that's still a great way to communicate with people.
ReplyDeleteAnd, yes, I have looked around the blogosphere. There are blog posts that are singing 6A praises, and there are blog posts that are talking about dropping 6A as their platform and then there are people in the middle, noting that they will stick with 6A but not recommend it to people for corporate blogs.
Even a comment on your blog notes that an email might have been a better way to go about it.
What are my suggestions? Heck, I have a few if you are really interested in talking. How the different parts of the post I wrote are not part of a story does seem odd, since they all seem germane, but YMMV.
Jeremy, I have no clue what my traffic would be like today had it not been for my "Hurricane Katrina/United Way" sabbatical, but I will say that people are finding my new blog location.
ReplyDeleteI feel a lot better being my own administrator -- and my web-host company absolutely rocks.
Let me know if/when you are thinking about taking your destiny into your own hands...
I wonder how you'd be feeling now -if you had an MT install that used del.icio.us to drive your blogroll or other portions of your blog.
ReplyDelete(full disclosure: I run an MT install - on an independent server)
Colin, I'd consider the blog to be a link/SPAM blog.
ReplyDeleteI'm not convinced Six Apart did enough to let people know what they were doing to resolve the situation. Hopefully they've learned their lesson, and will put in place a protocol for getting the message out. Stuff happens.
ReplyDeleteI've been involved with a banking system that went down for up to 24 hours pre-Christmas, and the world didn't collapse around our ears. Customers were inconvenienced, and we apologized.
The worst kind of web outage is the one where no one notices. If you're offline for the day and no one cares, you are truly screwed.
Eric, I'd have to agree. Six Apart has not done enough to fully address their users.
ReplyDeleteSome examples.
Barak Berkowitz, Chairman and CEO of Six Apart, gave a very contrition filled nice explanation of the problems ... in Debbie Weil's CEOBlogWrite site, as a comment. It is not on the Typepad site. In fact, no explanation with any depth appeared until today, on their site.
Barak hasn't posted one word on his blog since December 10, 2005.
Mena Trott is apparently still healing wounds from her Les Blogs meltdown. No posts from her since then.
Benjamin Trott has been writing about music and other such frivolities while this all came down.
MSNBC, Forbes and countless others pointed to them and said "failure" by pointing out their foibles.
A podcast with Technorati was their strategy for crisis response? Please.
They failed, again, to implement any customer base emails - on a wide scale - and although a bit better about posting to the support blog, they just dropped the ball again.
Why they cannot learn from these mistakes is a mystery.
Email could help. Offer an opt-in/opt-out support list for members to subscribe to for such instances.
Six Apart seems to think that the customers should come to them (visit the blog) when problems occur. When the problem is Six Apart's, they should be proactive and go to the customers. The blog isn't enough.
Jeremy,
ReplyDeleteI'm with you on this one. I've noticed quite a few bloggers that I follow switching to Typepad and others. I looked into it and thought "Google is pretty darn reliable with their search engine (obviously) and G-mail, and several other G-products I've used" so I'm sticking with Blogger.
Good Call.
Regards,
Chief Show Officer
www.showoffcards.com
So, didya do any weekend blogging, Jeremy? Have heard there was a lot of trouble with blogger.
ReplyDeleteWhat comes around, goes around, I guess. Everybody -- platform that is -- has its downtime.
;)
Mike