Should I Buy Radio?:
Matthew Trump’s Should-I-Buy-Radio Weblog: “My latest puzzle is about wrapping my mind around what I call ‘the Radio Paradigm.’ What I mean by that is the idea of Radio as both a weblogging server/tool and a community of users with Radio weblogs.”
Bingo. Matthew hit the nail on the head. That’s one thing that’s been bugging me about Radio 8, too.
There’s a lot I like about Radio, but I really have zero interest in having a blog hosted at http://radio.weblogs.com/0100634/. However, if I want to use Radio, I must host my blog on weblogs.com at that screwy number address. I can additionally mirror that blog at other sites, e.g. I’m using the Manilla-Blogger Bridge Tool to make sure everything is also posted to my real blog, Ten Reasons Why. I could also FTP the content to another site, but, as far as I have been able to discern, there’s no way to turn off the weblogs.com site. I don’t like the idea of my audience being split. I don’t want to have two mirror blogs. But to use Radio 8, I’m forced into either having two mirrored blogs or hosting my blog solely on weblogs.com.
Personally, I think I’d probably be more likely to pay UserLand $40 for Radio once my trial period runs out if it was not tied to a hosted site. Not sure of UserLand’s intent here. As far as I can tell, there’s no reason any of the functionality couldn’t also work on any other site (I’ll have to test the FTP option to confirm this), so by giving an option to not use the weblogs.com hosted site, UserLand could save themselves support, money, bandwidth, etc.
The other issue for me is that though UserLand CEO Dave Winer touts web services a lot, Radio is ultimately a desktop application. If you don’t have a machine that has an always-on internet connection (e.g. can operate as a true web server), then you’re tied to that one desktop machine. So it installs a web server on your desktop machine. Big deal, I can install IIS for free. The webserver isn’t the big deal, it’s the content management that adds the value. I’m someone who works and writes from two or three different machines, none of which have a persistent internet connection (for various reasons). I need a content management tool that is entirely online(Blogger? The upcoming Blogger Pro? Manila?), not tied to a particular desktop machine. That’s where Radio really breaks down. I’ve asked, and apparently there’s no way to use Radio 8 from multiple machines unless the machine it’s installed on has a persistent internet connection. Absent that, UserLand’s Radio 8 becomes significantly less useful for this user.