The popular “free” educational blogging site Edublogs has begun inserting inline content link ads in the posts of their free blogs. Once users are logged in, they no longer appear, but anyone view the blog sees the ads.
To disable the ads, one must become an Edublogs supporter costing $25 per year. There are other benefits such as more server space and Twitter integration. Alternatively, schools can set up Campus subscriptions starting at $900 per year for 100 blogs.
On the popular Classroom 2.0 site, teachers are registering shock and dismay at this unannounced development, saying that they feel “bamboozled.” Concern has been expressed about control over the content of these ads. Teachers and students have invested much into this blog platform and suddenly find the landscape has changed.
In fairness to Edublogs, the potential for advertising has been in their terms of service for some time–I looked into it many months ago. (You DO read the TOS before clicking I accept, don’t you?). In this tightening economy, the flow of easy captial has been shut off. The free hosted social applications need to pay their bills to keep their servers up and running and to pay staff.
I have always expressed concern about hosted Web 2.0 solutions for these very reasons. There is also the issue of data ownership. If one of these companies goes belly up overnight as has been the case with so many major corporations of late, what happens to your data?
The solution is free and open source software on either rented web server space, or on in-house servers. No, these are not “free” solutions, but they are inexpensive. Webhosting accounts can be had for as little as $5 a month and most offer ample resources for hosting your own Web 2.0 solutions. Furthermore, you will not find yourself blindsided by changes in policies and terms.
There are many options for software. Multiple blogs can be hosted on WordPressMU, Social Networks on Elgg, and the list goes on.
Stay tuned for more such developments and start studying up on free and open source Web 2.0 applications. As has been said so many times before: there is no such thing as a free lunch!
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Tags: edublogs, Elgg, open source, web 2.0, wordpressmu, WPMU
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Exactly Steve. Your point is well made. “The free hosted social applications need to pay their bills to keep their servers up and running and to pay staff.” — educators need to wake up to this fact of life. The free ride is over and we need to take responsibility once more.
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Something else interesting. I went over to Classroom 2.0 to see at first hand what you were writing about. I noticed a reference to a posting entitled “Spitting Mad at Edublogs …” dated Nov 9th, but though I could find lots of references *to* the posting the actual entry itself did not appear in any search. Maybe the author deleted it in retrospect?
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I thank you for this posting. After just switching my blog to edublog I am switching back to blogger. My problem with edublog is threefold.
-First, this is not merely a social networking 2.0 site, were this myspace I would have no problem with the ads. However, it is a school site which supposedly exists to support education. The purpose of these adds is to drive students’ attention away from educational content. This is appalling.
-Second, some of the ad content is in violation of my school’s honor code. I can not access it now because of my third issue, but when I wrote the word “essay” on my blog, it gave a link for essay writing “services” that actually claim to write placement essays for you. Again, I would provide you with the link, but I cannot.
-Third, if the ads were both necessary and honorable, there would be consistency when they are displayed, but there is not. They appear at random and go away just as reliably even when one is not logged in.
Sure, twenty-five dollars is not a lot to pay for a service; however, teachers do not make a lot of money and do need to purchase many materials for the classes they teach. Edublogs is trying to take advantage of an open market by masquerading as something they are not, an education friendly port of wordpress.
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I don’t believe most teachers hosted on edublogs have a problem understanding the bottom line and that advertising is a way for a hosting site to keep afloat. What they feel blind-sided by is the fact that edublogs has insisted from the beginning that it was “free” and in service to educators. (In other words, they know the hassles we have getting anything past a filter/tech policy and will stay appropriately within certain limits to be useful to us.) The reason most of us can’t host on other sites is that advertising is not limited to what is considered “appropriate” to our schools standards, etc. If edublogs had simply placed a banner or some other device on the blogs that was “juried” for school filters, there would have been far less fuss about it.
The problem with edublogs’ move is that it was unannounced and that it’s actually within the CONTENT of the blog posts. What can you say about the rhetoricical implications of what happened to one of my posts, for instance? In the midst of railing agains the problems I had with an HP that I had to have completely rebuilt FOUR times by HP in three years, Edublogs splattered no fewer than NINE hyper links to HP and Best Buy products. Ridiculous. We’re talking about two paragraphs….nine screaming blue hyperlinks to the “perpetrators”.
What I find troubling is that it’s starting to feel like strong arm tactics to remove any non-paying educators on the site. Pay the fee for this free service or, we won’t just put semi annoying advertising across the bottom of your blog, we’ll destroy any integrity your words were suppose to possess. (and make it look really ugly and confusing to boot!) Hyperlinks aren’t just an unobtrusive appendix arrow to find information, they are CONTENT. Particularly obnoxious when they activate a bubble whenever a cursor floats over them! Really, is it that hard to understand the frustration?
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Why can’t edublogs supporter accounts be free to teachers? Our school is cutting teachers and there is no way they have money to pay for blog accounts for the staff that wants to use them.
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