Well this sucks. I have mirrored 'blog content on weblogs.com (at eric.weblogs.com, to be preceise) since about 2000. The site was a free 'blog-hosting service run by Dave Winer (and others, I assume).

Today, I was greeted with a rather shocking sight: eric.weblogs.com was replaced by a message stating that Dave couldn't afford to host the 'blogs anymore. My stuff was gone. Yikes.

So now I'm:

• Unable to post an item that tells people where the new home of eric.weblogs.com will be
• Unable to set up a redirect, either in HTML or RSS
• Unable to get at the site's membership list to send out an e-mail regarding this change.

I completely, asolutely understand Dave's unwillingness to pay for hosting these sites, but from where I stand, this sucks. This was not done in a considerate manner. No effort was made to meet the weblogs.com community half-way. Of course, the death of weblogs.com may have been announced somewhere, and I certainly may have missed the announcement. Or it may have been swallowed by a spam filter.

This is personally troubling, as well as inconsistent with Dave's public message. Dave has consistently (and correctly) pointed out the importance of a collective web-memory, of permanent URLs, and of accessibility of web content to search engines. This is even more troubling, when I see sites like doc.weblogs.com still accessible.

As of this morning, years worth of my posts are gone. Rather than just redirect the index page of the 'blog to the message above, the whole site archive is gone. All that content, all indexed by Google, is now gone.

Even though the site was hosted for free, I feel deceived.