DISQUS

Climb to the Stars: U-Blog, Six Apart, and Their Angry Bloggers

  • Xavier · 5 years ago
    Doing an English write-up of the whole situation is in my opinion a great idea, thank you Stephanie.
    I sure hope this will get some reactions from the staff at SixApart (both the US and Europe sides), particularly from Loïc who, as you said, has proven himself to be unable to clear the situation once and for all (wether it's on Ublog homepage, his own blog or in comments elsewhere), while worsening his franco-reputation by literally mocking his paying customers and critics.
    Your post does a good job at summing up the situation, while not going the alt.kill.loiclemeur way some Ublog customers have unfortunately gone. Great post.
    Now let's see if it gets someone to move...
  • Riccardo "Bru" Cambiassi · 5 years ago
    Thank you so much for sharing the whole story and taking the time to write it down!!!!
    Really interesting. I won't go into personal opinion here. Just appreciating the chance you gave me and others to access "french side" of the blogosphere too.

    Take care,
    Bru
  • Rhalph · 5 years ago
    Xavier > About the "alt.kill.loiclemeur way" : As someone said, it's hard for Ublog customers (like me) not to become furious, because of these repeated silences, unanswered questions and so on...
  • flipflap · 5 years ago
    Great job!
  • nikkiana · 5 years ago
    Thanks for blogging about this, Stephanie. I think it's a pretty relevant happening in the blogosphere, and it only makes me wish I could read and understand French to better understand what's going on.
  • Anne · 5 years ago
    Just for information

    http://chiboum.free.fr/offreublog

    Which shows what promises has been done... and seeming never to be realised...
  • Gluon · 5 years ago
    Pretty good explanation of what's happening. Amazing how the news spread in all directions in the world of blogs.
  • Steph · 5 years ago
  • Steph · 5 years ago
    http://mediatic.blogspot.com/2004/07/du-pouvoir... (about Suw's comment on Jeff Jarvis's post)
  • Loic · 5 years ago
    Hi Stéphanie, thank you for the last update on your post that takes out any doubt readers of Jeff's blog may have about me hiding the issue to Six Apart which would be quite stupid from me, here are some notes about the story that I have also posted on Jeff Jarvis' blog.

    About the fact that there are only a few angry U-blog users on 22000 I agree that they should be taken care of and that is what I believe I have been doing since it started and I also spend hours answering comments on my last post in French.

    The problem has started to happen as early as we announced the Typepad exclusive representation partnership in Europe, months ago.

    Six Apart US has known about it since the very first day (and even before as we all thought there were risks that it would happen and difficult to avoid it by introducing Typepad on Ublog) and therefore months before the acquisition of Ublog, it is not really my style in business to hide anything to my partners, Stephanie may check that with any partner I have worked with in the last 8 years of business.

    I had written a post immediately about it in French here (http://www.loiclemeur.com/france/2004/05/merci_...) and discussed with the angry Ubloggers immediately, with tens of comments on this post and a discussion that started with my clients.

    Some users offered me to organize a chat with me which I gladly accepted and just before the hour chosen for the chat, nobody showed up, so I also think we tried to discuss as much as we could with our users.

    Anyway, this has been an issue for a while, limited to a few number of U-blog users as most of them are obviously happy, some moved obviously to Typepad too. The number of blogs created on Ublog went from 2000 when I acquired it to more than 22 000 with a strong growth, I think this shows that we have a few happy users too...

    I have posted again about it on my French blog and there are tens of comments so the discussion is going on again and I am trying to understand the issue better and solve it as much as I can with my team. Here is the url: http://www.loiclemeur.com/france/2004/07/laveni...

    If you are interested in this issue, stay tuned for a post on my side soon. Thanks.
  • didier · 5 years ago
    hi stephanie, some comments from my side, as a french blogger who's posting in english ;-) i find your summary very good and factual. let me add some impressions:

    - i think that this story is a typical french one. why? we are confronted here with some strong but existing and real french stereotypes: french people do not like entrepreneurs, they do not like successful managers, they do not like (and/or trust) people who are communicating in english, the level of understanding of the business reality is incredibly low...and french people do not care! our remaining arrogance?

    - nothing, i mean - really - nothing can excuse impoliteness, impropriety, or libels in a discussion such like this one. i find personally loic very patient in this field with some of his clients.

    - we see here clearly a side effect of using the blogs as a base for business communication. a few unsatisfied people can have a huge impact on the overall customer community and its feeling. some posts are acting as "unguided missiles" in the blogosphere. on the other hand, is the propagation of information really working in another way in the "real" world?

    - stephanie, i must say that i don't agree with you concerning one point: i don't think that loic is not understanding his clients or that he is not communicating well. i personnaly think that he is investing too much time and energy with this little number of unsatisfied customers! Before taking them seriously, they have to have themselves realistic expectations. by staying on this very emotional, agressive und unconstructive level, it will be so or so impossible to find a solution. it is not possible to satisfy all the customers. by loosing the focus on serving the majority of your clients and investing time in trying to satisfy the unrealistic expectations of the minority, you could kill your business. The kind of motto "the client is - always - king" is quite dangerous to my mind.

    hope i was not boring.
    cheers, didier

    ps1: i know loic only from his blogs, i have nothing to do with U-Blog, Six Apart, MovableType or TypePad. i'm blogging with Blogger, my own hoster and blogkomm.

    ps2: see also my post.
  • Pascal · 5 years ago
    All, I don’t know if this is the place to say that I am a satisfied Typepad.fr customer but this is a fact and I know I am not the only one. I was a customer of Ublog Plus, ready to pay €4 for it, and now for the same price I have more: Typepad (pro), in French, witch is just great (by the way, since I switched to Typepad about four months ago, I have tripled the number of visits, pages views and comments. This is another fact. Thank you Typepad.fr).
  • Steph · 5 years ago
  • racontars · 4 years ago
    Bonjour, je lis avec des mois de retard votre article sur l'affaire u-ublog. tout d'abord, je vous précise que je suis loin d'être une experte en anglais et qu'il y adonc des subtilités qui m'ont peut-être échappées. c'est aussi pour cela que je vous répond en français.
    Je trouve que votre papier est un bon résumé de ce qui s'est passé.
    Il manque peut-être une conclusion à  cette affaire. Les Ublog plus, c'est-à -dire les payants, ceux qui constituaient la communauté, ont fuit en masse. Certains effectivement ont émigré vers typePad. Mais un très grand nombre ont trouvé refuge sur d'autres plate-forme comme CanalBlog. Une grosse partie ont décidé de se lander dans le grand vide et ont leur propre blog sans plate forme. c'est ce qui laisse la plus grande part à  la créativité visuelle. Le Ublog de Stéphane Le Solliec nous permettait e faire ce que nous voulions visuellement de nos blogs. Il y en avait des vraiment magnifiques. Type-Pad est beaucoup moins souple. La commmunauté ne s'est pas dissoute pour autant puisque nous nous suivons d'une adresse l'autre. Et qu'à  la fin de mon blog payant, je vais les rejoindre dans la blogosphère libre.
    D'ailleurs, si vous allez sur la page d'accueil d'Ublog et que vous regardez les commentaire des blogs-plus, vous verrez qu'il sont en train de disparaître. cette page qui contenait des centaines et des centaines de notes publiées avant l'ère Loic le Meur n'en comptent plus qu'une vingtaine.
    C'est une exemple assez triste d'un talent créatif tué par une société. Ça aurait pu marcher, si le produit u-blog avait été développé, c'est ce que nous souhaitions tous, et si on n'avait pas voulu nous imposer pour fort cher un produit de moindre qualité. Il ne faut pas nous faire prendre des vessie pour des lanternes. Nous ne refusions pas le développement, le commercial, l'entreprise, mais en tant qu'utilisateur, nous avons considéré qu'on essayait de nous rouler. Et n'y voyez pas là  un réflexe anti aglais ou anti-américain. Nous n'allions tout de même pas accepter un produit bas de gamme juste pour prouver que nous aimions l'Amérique :-)
    Cela dit, je n'en veux pas du tout à  Loïc Le Meur (ou juste un peu quand même). Il est normal que chacun joue sa partie. Je trouve cela dommage cependant et je crois qu'il est passé à  côté d'un truc qui aurait pu être formidable. les qualité du produit u-blog allié à  son génie communiquant. C'est ce que nous avons cru et c'est pour cela que nous avons signé et payé.
    En final de compte, je trouve cette histoire un peu pathétique. Ce n'est pas un sentiment commercial, c'est vrai...
  • Bertil · 4 years ago
    Well done Stephany
    I'd prefer reading your findings and comments in french, but my knowledge of your languange is far too week. I'll certainly try to better that fact some day. As I don't know anyting about the story from other sources, I cannot judge as to the correctness of your summary. From the pure tune of your post, I'll conclude that it is as factual as is possible.
    I'm sure happy to see someone tackle the language barrier to inform about things going on in the french speaking sphere.
    In any community spanning multiple nationalities and languages, there needs to be some lingua franca to bridge the babalian gap. Although Lingua Franca according to Encyclopedia Britanica is latin for "Frankish language" ( spoken by the Franks in old time ), the English language has become the de facto LF on the web.
    This follows the pattern of other multilingual communities, as sailors and pilots.
    Human translation of sites and blogs would be a vast undertaking and machine translation still leaves a lot to wish for.
    So we have a problem in making cooperation and understanding over language borders.
    Thanks for your cross language summary!
  • Bertil · 4 years ago
    OH! Sorry I misspelled your name