Blogging went mainstream a few hours ago, as Microsoft just released the beta version of their MSN Spaces service.
If for defensive purposes only, I've laid claim to a plot at MSN Spaces, complete with a pointer back here. I've only taken a quick look at things, but anyone who has ever used MSN Hotmail will be familiar with the interface, and know right away how simple it is to use.
Because a cookie for Microsoft's passport is on my computer, setting up the bare bones space took only a few seconds (though response time seems very slow today, you can guess that they're probably being swamped), as simple as I'm sure it will be for any and all English-speakers among Hotmail's 187 million user accounts.
Why is this important? Back over the Summer, ESPN and Microsoft parted ways, with Fox Sports taking ESPN's place as the preferred sports partner on MSN:
The newly formed alliance between FOXSports.com and the MSN
As much as I dislike some aspects of MS, I’m happy about this because basically the more players, the more competition and the more features available to more people at the lower costs. It also opens blogging up to more people, which also, theoretically is a good thing. Even if everyone in the world is blogging, you will still be able to get to the blogs that appeal to you most via services like bloglines and just recommendations by friends and other bloggers. Of course a big percentage of the blogs out there will be little more than personal hour-by-hour accounts of the minutia of teenagers’ lives and other insipid stuff, but hey, there’s gonna be an audience for that and who am I to say anything against such stuff. As long as we continue to see a large choice of offerings, you will be able to pick and choose. Actually “large” isn’t the word! I wonder if with the prevelence of all these different players more and more bloggers will start putting up multiple blogs for different audiences and purposes. Sure, some are already doing this, but it could get a lot more commona…
The potential is there, but will it really be leveraged? I have doubts. In the mid-90s, speculation was that independent domains/websites wouldn’t be able to compete with directory-hosted webspaces, because, after all, how would anyone find those millions of disconnected sites? Search engines took care of that.
In a similar move, AOL launched their AOL Journals blogging service earlier this year. Same advantages that MSN can claim: Millions of users as a base, etc. As of right now, they haven’t noticably changed the blogging universe. I don’t see where MSN can do any better.