There is a new site that wants to be the home of Catholic bloggers – StBlogs.com (not to be confused with StBlogs.org home of Catholic Light and others). This is a free service that allows you to either start a new blog, or if you currently have one to import your old data and your current template into their system. They also currently include 50 megs of data storage.
So if you are considering starting a blog or are sick of blogger or another system check out stblogs.com. They are currently in beta and there system is based on WordPress which is an excellent publishing system.
In somewhat related news. Joshua LeBlanc who runs cybercatholics.com (which provides good Catholic webhosting) has announced the 2007 Catholic Blog awards.
The Catholic Blog Awards will begin taking nominations on Feb 4 and will end at noon on Feb 9.
Voting will then begin on on Feb 12 and end Feb 16th at noon.
This year we have had a programmer volunteer his time and he will be building a system for us that will require registration and a valid email address to register. Assuming that everything goes as it should, it will all be automated and no results will be displayed until the winners are announced. This will prevent people seeing who is ahead and attempting to rally people to go and vote for them. I think doing this will make things fairer and a true representation of which blogs truly represent.
If you have any suggestions please email them to cba@catholicblogawards.com. Every year Joshua spends much time and effort into making the Catholic Blog Awards work and with a new programmer volunteer this year should have the best system ever. There has been some controversy in past years
9 comments
I’m a little leery of the StBlogs.com guys. For one thing, why don’t they just come out and tell you that they’re part of Catholic Online (which has been sliding leftward in recent years)?
Second, where have they been? What have they been doing over the past five years or six years while Catholic blogging has grown? Are they part of the “parish” or just moving in to take over?
Third, who ends up owning the blog? What rights do they get over your writing? And what’s with the topic-related blogs and things? Very confusing.
Fourth, and this applies mainly to established bloggers, why should I give up my independence and my hard-won reputation (as well as my well-linked web address) to them? I’m giving them the value of my reputation. What do I get in return?
This last one doesn’t just apply to StBlogs.com, but to several other commercial ventures that have asked me to join their site blogs or to contribute. A worker is worth his wages.
I would recommend for anyone who wants to get started blogging to just go to Blogger.com and sign up for a free account. And if you want to get serious about it and buy some reliability up front (because you get what you pay for), subscribe to a service like Typepad.com.
I’d rather go with a big “agnostic” company than with a Catholic group whose motives I don’t know.
Hello, Jeff and thanks for the mention of StBlogs.com. I’m Rick Rotondi, owner of the stblogs.com domain.
And Dom, thanks for your comments. I love your writing. To prevent any misunderstanding, there is no connection between StBlogs.com and Catholic Online. The only other live site in our network is CatholicLibrary.com.
I was an early blog reader and commentator and registered stblogs.com in 2002, always intending to develop it. I needed the talents of Lee Anderson to do so. I’ve long been involved in Catholic book publishing, and also Catholic online ventures. I was the originating partner of the once popular website CatholicFreebies.com.
Dom, I would love to see a model develop where Catholic bloggers were paid for their content based on the size of their audience. I hope this does develop, and StBlogs.com helps pave the way. If I were rich venture capitalist we might implement such a model immediately. Alas, Providence has assigned me a more modest state in life, so we are trying to get StBlogs.com launched with a miniscule budget and a lot of elbow grease. We can’t pay writers (yet) but we do offer Catholic writers a chance for a new and potentially larger audience. And of course we absolutely do not require Stblogs.com bloggers to give up other blogs. Catholic bloggers can benefit from the promotional possibilities of our network by establishing a new blog on Stblogs.com while keeping and maintaining any existing ones. The Stblogs.com could serve as a digest or “best of” for existing bloggers.
Again, thanks for your comments. And I do hope some of your readers, Jeff, will pay us a visit!
Thanks Dom for your comments. They will help us address any potential concerns from bloggers.
First, as mentioned by Rick Rotondi, there is no affiliation with Catholic Online.
Second, all Personal Blogs are owned by their respective bloggers. We do have some aggressive and exciting plans for Regional Blogs and Topical “Column Like” Blogs.
Third, I am not suggesting to all established bloggers that an outright move to our service is necessarily right for them.
In fact, I have spoken with several bloggers interested in switching over from (typically) blogger.com. I actually go out of my way to recommend to them that they keep their current blogs until they are absolutely certain they want to make a switch.
Even then, I suggest simply posting a final message on their old blogs directing their readers to their new blogs.
If you examine our informational copy on our website http://stblogs.com, you will see that this is the case. In some cases, we do in fact see stblogs.com as a replacement. In others, as Rick mentions in his comment, we are only suggesting using Stblogs.com as a FREE promotional tool for bloggers.
Anyway, I am trying to provide another avenue for bloggers to promote their material. Why not offer the choice?
Concerning, Blogger.com – is it really as good as the platform we use? For the most part, they are about the same.
But try and do a backup of your blog. Then try to get those posts hosted elsewhere. Essentially, they hold you hostage. I can personally tell you, from a technical point of view, this is very difficult to near impossible.
With our service, we are holding no captives. If people ever decide to move to another platform, they are able to make a one-button backup of all their posts, categories, comments, and even members.
Also, concerning Blogger.com, do you see any place where Catholic Writers are promoted as such? Stblogs.com is a Catholic Home for the Catholic Blog.
Finally, several new bloggers have just joined. These are people who have never shared their faith online before. Some of these people are 79-80 years old and have barely used a computer before. I am bending over backwards to help these fine Catholic people get their blogs established so that they can share the faith and wisdom that they offer. I am honored to be able to help them.
Try getting that from Blogger or any other “agnostic” service out there.
Anyway, I really do appreciate your input, it will help us improve.
Lee Anderson
System Administrator
http://stblogs.com
http://catholiclibrary.com
I apologize if I mischaracterized your service. I tried to find some information about the people offering this service (you might take that as a hint that you need to make this more transparent) and I eventually ended up at a Catholic Online page. Maybe that was an external link that I didn’t see.
Do you mind if I ask what is the business model behind your site? How is it funded and how do you intend to keep it in operation? In other words, where will revenue come from?
Good luck on the venture in any case. I believe in the free market, and the more blogs, the merrier.
Your criticisms of Blogger are right on, which is why I don’t use them.
I think my other reservations, as my opinion, remain relevant, but others may beg to differ.
Rick and Lee,
Below is a link to a post from a blogger who raises some interesting concerns. I’d be interested in your take, especially since he mentions a post of mine that might be viewed by some as “objectionable” content violating your not-very-well defined “decency” policy.
http://respublicaetcetera.blogspot.com/2007/01/new-catholic-blogging-service.html
As the owner and operator of CatholicBlogs.com and a professional web developer, I have serious concerns too:
1) The site is run on WordPress MU (multi-user). This free script is very well done, but requires a huge amount of resources. As more and more bloggers sign up for accounts, will StBlogs.com take the necessary steps to upgrade their server? Or will the users start experiencing more and more downtime? Where will the money come from to upgrade?
A quick look at the WPMU tech support forums will show you that lots of people have scalability problems.
2) Have the owners taken appropriate steps to protect themselves from legal liability? Recent court decisions have been unfavorable to bloggers on issues like copyright violations and defamation. Their Terms of Service are so vague that they’d never hold up in court.
3) What is their Privacy Policy? CatholicFreebies.com, a site which Rick formerly ran, was recognized by many as a scheme (though it was disclosed in the frequently ignored privacy policy) to collect personal information and share it with marketers.
4) While the Terms of Service claims that you remain the owner of the content, the very next sentence clearly states:
“Any original content submitted to StBlogs.com may be distributed by us without restriction, on StBlogs.com and other websites in our network, in other digital media formats, in books or printed media, or via mechical or any other means of reproduction.”
So if an accomplished writer like Amy Welborn joined the network, they could turn around and publish her articles in books or magazines without permission?
Their TOS also state:
“Stblogs.com reserves the right to place appropriate advertising on any and all blogs within its network.”
I don’t have a concern about that, but many peole may not realize that until after they sign up. (Afterall, most people don’t read the Terms of Service.)
I am contemplating a switch of my blog to St.Blog’s.com, largely because of some of the pornographic material I see on other Blogger Blogs which visit my site. I flag them, and often they’re back, as offensive as ever.
Lee Anderson encouraged me to remain on Blogger until I was absolutely certain I wanted to switch. In fact, I was never asked to give up on Blogger, I can keep both if I want.
I think that, as I get used to WordPress, and my readers move there, I will slowly re-locate, and eventually close ‘Cause of Our Joy’ on Blogger.
I still have “Causa Nostrae Laetitiae” on Blogger, however, now that I know of their potential to pay well-read bloggers, I may switch that blog as well.
While I can see the reasonableness of some of the concerns raised here, I can say that I have had nothing but good experiences at StBlogs.com. I moved An Examined Life there from Blogger, and Lee Anderson made the transition extremely easy, in fact, doing most of the work for me!
Although it is true that advertising did appear on my blog without any advance warning, as soon as I saw it I asked that it be removed, and it was removed immediately (it was one of those Ads by Blogger things). I think the folks at StBlogs are very responsive. Everyone may not be satisfied with what they’re trying to offer, but I am very happy so far. If things go south I’m prepared to move again, but at this point I rather value the possibility of a Catholic forum for Catholic blogs.
I am wondering if they are going to do the same thing as last year and have some mysterious “committee” decide by their own criteria who deserves nomination or not based on some subjective “examination” of the “Catholic content” of the blogs involved. I though that premise was stupid and if they do it again, it will make the so-called “awards” cheapened again -much as nominating people in categories where they have no business being nominated does. (This particularly happened last year -though this did not happen in Jeff’s case with this blog.)
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