OPEN

Typepad, the service which hosts this blog, was
down yesterday for 18 hours Not helpful, as I would have liked to have have written a post or two.

You could still view this blog but it
had lost its most recent posts after December 1st. I was a bit nervous for a while that I had lost a few posts.

The repeated problems at Typepad are becoming a concern to me. For a personal blog, it’s not a major issue – you work round it.

But when it’s for business you have a bigger problem – whether you’re talking about a corporate blog carrying important information (ahem, like the Typepad status blog, which tells you about the latest Typepad problems) or even internal blogs for collaborative working / information sharing.

We’re
at a point with connected media and business communications where we are
crossing over from early adopters to early majority – the famous chasm, in
Moore’s model of technology adoption. This requires services to be simple to
use (which Typepad mostly is) and to "just work" (which Typepad sometimes doesn’t).

I’m
counselling a number of people about setting up their blogs and blog
communities in their organisations. Previously, I have always recommended
Typepad – its password protection and ability to host several blogs on the same
account make it useful for business blogging.

If you can help people to start using a blog service and it keeps "breaking" they may not bear with it, they will lose interest. It will make them look bad in front of sceptical colleagues who already think they are on a fool’s errand trying to pioneer new ways of working with blogs. 

It will just make our whole job here harder. Innovators and early adopters are prepared to tolerate inconveniences and hiccups, but mainstream users and readers will not.

Typepad has been talking about launching a business class service, which I presume would mean service level agreements etc. to guarantee blogs. I hope the company can launch this soon.

But
for now, I’m feeling a little awkward.

I’m
going to look into other options: but I still feel that Typepad has the
potential to be the platform of choice, though.

Maybe they need some more
investment, a better data centre, or more IT people. I see from an interview by Niall Kennedy with Anil Dash, VP of professional products at Six Apart (the company that runs Typepad), that the company is indeed hiring – take a look or listen to the interview here.

Any
suggestions for alternative approaches gratefully received.

Right now, I’m thinking that hosting blogs on my company’s servers might be the answer, but I would prefer to keep it outsourced, or even to stay with Typepad, if they can iron out their issues.