Ode to Blogger

Pyra, the company that created the Blogger self-publishing software program, provided the tools for a world of zinesters aiming to change the Net through painfully honest confessional writing and a warmly open-hearted community. It also epitomized that world itself. Pyra's software let a thousand budding poets bloom, and inspired fans so rabid that they paid for a new computer server for the company. So it's perhaps not surprising that Pyra's demise has, in turn, inspired an outpouring of yet more heartbreaking confessions in personal diaries across the Net.

Pyra has run out of money, company founder Ev wrote in his personal weblog on Thursday. Although many Blogger users may have suspected the end was coming, given the fundraisers and patchy software performance of late, the news was still an unwelcome revelation for anyone who logged on to his home page. "It really breaks my heart to see the group of awesome people that I was so damn proud of having assembled break apart, feeling beaten and with dreams unrealized," wrote Ev.

Meanwhile, former Pyra employee Jack Saturn has his own reminiscence up. "I used to think that the Web was going to be my life's focus (or at least the focus of my twenties, since I knew that something bigger and better would appear within another ten years), but somewhere along the line it all crumbled for everyone," he sighs. And over at Metafilter, the blogger tracker to end all blogger trackers, a public wake is taking place. "I feel ill," writes one mourner.

Sure, Pyra's just another dot-com to go down the drain. But the blogging movement embodied a strain of the early Net ethos that's been mostly lost in the ensuing chaos of IPOs and money-grubbing executives. Watching the company's painfully public demise is somehow more poignant than Amazon.com employees griping about their layoffs. Ev says he is planning to keep the Blogger software alive on his own, but even that small patch of idealism now seems unsuited for the harsh realities of the business world in 2001. Consider it the end of an era. --Janelle Brown [1:30 p.m. PST, Jan. 25, 2001]

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Sleep late to save your business

After all the bitterness of the economic downturn and the layoffs happening in every corner of the industry, it was refreshing to pick up the paper on Wednesday and see a company cutting back in a way that actually seemed humane.

Charles Schwab has announced that it is going to have to reduce expenses in order to meet its quarterly goals. Instead of doing this by, say, axing the customer service department or laying off every third person on its staff, the company came up with a more original plan: forced, unpaid vacation. In the next five weeks, at least 10,000 of the company's 26,300 employees will be asked to take three Fridays off, unpaid.

Now this is a cost-cutting plan that we approve of. Not only is it a gentler, more humane way to temporarily cut expenses than layoffs, but think of the things the staffers can do with their free time: long ski weekends, road trips, knitting classes, you name it. In the dark, cold days of February, a little more free time is actually a nice bonus. Sure, those employees' paychecks will temporarily be slightly slimmer -- but it sure beats getting laid off. And hey, they could always use those free Fridays to earn extra cash by, say, picking up bottles for recycling or, perhaps, heading to Las Vegas to gamble.

Perhaps more companies facing the inevitable belt-tightening should take heed of Schwab's strategy and consider giving their own employees a day off. -- Janelle Brown [12 p.m. PST, Jan. 31, 2001]

Et tu, Amazon?

Layoffs in the dot-com sector have become so banally ubiquitous that the news that 1,300 workers at Amazon.com got the ax today is likely to elicit no more than world-weary sighs from jaded dot-commers.

Just try to name 10 dot-coms that haven't had layoffs in the last year. Yahoo, eBay ... it gets tougher after the first two, doesn't it? Still, Amazon is a Net industry bellwether -- if it is possible to call a dot-com a bellwether of anything with a straight face -- and CEO Jeff Bezos is the industry's famously giggly Time Magazine Man of the Year poster boy.

Even so, the company's sad sacking announcement just doesn't have the punch-in-the-bloated-gut impact to the beleaguered dot-com sector that it would have if the cuts had come even a month ago. In the past week, Lucent vowed to ice 10,000 jobs, and Chrysler promised to hack 26,000. MCI WorldCom is expected to cut 10 to 15 percent of its 77,000-member workforce this week.

Move over dot-com downturn, welcome to the downturn. --Katharine Mieszkowski [3:30 p.m. PST, Jan. 30, 2001]

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Your porno dollars are no good here

The St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital relies on donations to treat children with cancer and other life-threatening illnesses for free. Most gifts -- such as those from the Hair Club for Men -- are greatly appreciated. But if you're a pornographer, keep the cash. St. Jude's doesn't want it.

Just ask Eric Ridley, the founder of LoversCaughtonTape.com. He raised $6,200 for the hospital by giving away videotapes at a trade show and asking for donations in return. But when St. Jude officials discovered that Ridley was continuing the fundraiser online, they had their lawyers to send him cease-and-desist letters ordering him to take down any mention of St. Jude's. Even the slightest association with the site's "unwholesome wares," one letter argued, tarnishes the St. Jude's trademark, not to mention its "goodwill and reputation." And when Ridley failed to comply, he received a refund.

Of course, St. Jude's isn't the first organization to aggressively police its trademark on the web, nor is it the first nonprofit to reject money from a donor whose politics don't jibe with its own. But for a charity whose own fundraising letters estimate the cost of a year's leukemia treatment at $145,000, it seems a shame to turn down a donation simply because the source was deemed unsavory. -- Damien Cave [4 p.m. PST, Jan. 29, 2001]

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Who has the best "Survivor" game site?

There's only one game on CBS's latest "Survivor" incarnation, "The Australian Outback": avoiding getting voted out of the Godforsaken outback. What could be more obvious? But the CBS Web site seems a little unclear on the concept.

The site invites "Survivor" fans to play "Official Survivor Games," which consist of three little animated gizmos -- a fishing game, a wildlife photography game and a version of Tetris involving building a bridge while fending off hungry boars. It's a mystery why the network with the best game on television would think that this is how "Survivor" fans want to play along online.

Luckily, there's Survivor Deadpool, a fan-created site that fills the void by turning "Survivor" into a game you can play online. Web players vote on which survivor they think will get voted off the show each week and which team will win the weekly immunity challenges. Groups of Web players can even form alliances to compete against each other.

It's really pretty straightforward, but unlike CBS's official games, Survivor Deadpool captures the strategy that makes watching "Survivor" so compulsive. Leave it to fans on the Web to outwit, outplay and outlast the very network that brought them this schlock to obsess about in the first place. -- Katharine Mieszkowski [12 p.m. PST, Jan. 29, 2001]

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Techies make good with an online wish list

Every once in a while, someone will come up with a really compelling good Samaritan use of the Web that just makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. The Wish List, which was launched on Sunday by the Craig's List founders in conjunction with Cole Hardware, a San Francisco hardware store, is one of those uses.

The idea is simple: Schools can't afford supplies. Hardware stores have the stuff in abundance. Geeks have the money. Why not match them up? Using the Wish List feature, teachers can visit the Cole Hardware e-commerce site and register for any of the items the store sells; the 2 million monthly visitors to Craig's List -- a wide-ranging community for Bay Area techies -- can then visit the Cole Hardware Web site and buy any number of those goods for them at a 10 percent discount. It's the educational equivalent of the bridal registry, but with duct tape and magic markers instead of cut crystal vases and silver forks.

So far, a dozen classrooms are participating and a handful of teachers have already had their wishes fulfilled. The requests, says Cole Hardware proprietor Rick Karp, range from blenders and microwaves to drills and saws -- with the one common denominator, he says, being dry-erase wipers.

And the techies, in turn, can actually know where their money is doing good. "I think a lot of Internet-culture people would prefer to do something good where they can see the effects," explains Craig Newmark, the Craig's List founder. "Today we got a big thank-you card, made and signed by the kids from Mrs. Lopez's class. Hey, that ain't bad." -- Janelle Brown [11:15 a.m. PST, Jan. 29, 2001]

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