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Peter pointed out a recent posting from Pat Delaney. Pat has been using our "SchoolBlogs" service for a few months and picked up on the message I sent yesterday.
First a word to Pat. The beauty of Frontier and Manila and Radio is that you actually can learn how to develop great products and services with these all encompassing Networked Swiss Army Knives. Be you a contributor to the National Writing Project or a VJ. Just keep staring at the code and you'll eventually figure it out.
Hosting and maintaining such a service however, with actual users (teachers, students, parents) who expect your services to perform like any other infrastructure (gas, electricity, hot water...) is a totally different matter. It takes resources: time, people and money.
We started our test of Weblogs in Education on a winblows laptop with 64 megs of ram sitting on an ADSL connection at my home. We'd have to restart it about once a week, but ofcourse we were only running about 40 project blogs on it at the time. Once we started to get serious we moved the blogs over to a new server (OS X) running on our fiber at the DataBarn. I own all of these facilities, so the cost is hidden, but in reality it would probably be something like 5k Euros for the server and 2k Euros/month for the bandwidth and power supply.
Then there's my time, Bert's time and DJ's time. These guys nurse our server farms 24/7. No matter how stable your Operating System, how dedicated your connectivity or redundant your power supply is. Your shit will go down. That's Murphy. That's when you need people and time to get things back up and running, or a redundant everything in redudant locations...you get the idea. It's ok to fly solo, but expect some tense moments when the 'server is down' your cellphone is ringing constantly and, unlike me, you have a real job.
We've discussed the business model of SchoolBlogs many times over the past year. We agree that in order to have a business, we must have a fair exchange of value for our services, which includes the community of edubloggers that we facilitate.
I want our proposition (that's marketing speak for sales-pitch) to be simple and an offer you can't refuse.
Our plan is to offer singlar SchoolBlogs for free as they are now. That's a good deal, considering we get lots of word of mouth advertising and evangelism.
What we sell are the tools to turn any number of these schoolblogs into a true meetingpoint. We call it a TLHB, our acronym for Top Level Hosting Blog. You need these tools to tie single blogs together. Weblogs.com is a great example of such a tool on a global scale.
Out of the box, Manila comes with a full suite of wonderful tools for TLHBs. We've put time and money into customizing these tools and replicating them. Indeed, we're running as many domains as we can per server, stretching our physical and virtual bandwidth as far as we can.
Stretching your dollar or euro as far as you can is a common theme in education. Its sad that hundreds of millions go into education, but there never seems to be enough at the classroom level. Which is why we're looking at every possibility to enable the motivated to obtain a TLHB. We'll even set up reversed billing SMS.
We have yet to set pricing, but it will definitely be an offer too good to refuse, because we intend to be successful by scale. In a way it is like the housing business. Dave gave us the bricks and mortar and many pre-fab bits and pieces (not to mention lovely blueprints) we bought land, built the appartments and lease 'em out.
A major concern I hear often is lock-in. Even Pat makes mention of it. Well, we'll have none of that! At any time you wish, for whatever reason, you can download your entire schoolblog site and move it too any other server or service you wish. Since it's an XML bundle, you're not locked in to any proprietary system. UserLand understood the importance of zero-lock-in when creating their software, that spirit lives on in our endeavours.
As a footnote, next week is our last round of meetings with the folks at the Dutch ministry of education. I can see the brass ring, but stand on the shoulders of great guys like Dave and Peter as reach out for the grab...
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