weblogs.com, a free hosting service for bloggers, has closed 3000 sites without giving the users notice. Citing health, bandwidth, name server and other problems, the founder Dave Winer has offered to give site owners their data back next month – but the handling of the whole affair has angered many.
Blogging has become an incredibly popular past time – so much so that Bill Gates is encouraging it at Microsoft, and the company is rumoured to be bringing out a blogging product at some point.
Winer, now a research fellow at Harvard, found that running the service took too much time and effort, and pulled the plug.