See, Blogware is only available through selected Tucows partners - you can't buy Blogware directly from Tucows unless you are a reseller. We strongly believe in fostering, not interfering with, the relationships between our customers and their customers. Blogware is, by definition, an unfinished product until it gets into the hands of our partners, they wrap their value proposition around it, stick a price tag on it and sell the heck out of it. We can only tell you what the attributes of the product are before they get their hands on it. In most cases you'll find that we don't provide an overwhelming amount of end-user oriented information about our different services - we work with our resellers to make sure that they have what they need to drive customer adoption.
We don't bundle Blogware with email addresses, DNS or a domain name to stick on your shiny new blog. To some of you, these additional add-ons may not be interesting, for others, it is. We work with our resellers and help them figure out what might work best for them. We encourage our resellers to create an exceptional finished product that makes sense for *their* respective end-user customers. Happy users are users that renew. Users that renew keep our customers happy. Happy resellers make me happy
This is might be the number one thing that makes Blogware unique. It was built specifically to deal with the needs of ISPs and webhosters. Before Blogware service providers had three choices. 1) Buy an expensive license to a centralized content management system that would facilitate bloghosting, 2) do a separate installation for each user or 3) refer all sales to a third party and just give up on taking a cut. None of these options are particularly attractive.
Blogware handles this a little bit differently. First, it is a completely outsourced application. We handle the heavy lifting, the day to day management and administration of the infrastructure and all future development of the application code. This leaves our partners room to focus on important things like customer service, marketing and their core business. Second, the service was built to scale to meet the needs of a very demanding market. Need to set up 5000 blogs in the next 24 hours? No problem. Have a user that wants 100gb of storage and bandwidth to match? Piece of cake. Need to make sure that all of it is secure? Already taken care of.
Blogware brings blogging applications into a new class. Service providers need high performance mission critical-capable services. Blogware gives it to them.
Bloggers, on the other hand, have a slightly different, but complementary, set of needs. Blogware shines here as well.
I'll followup on this thought in a separate note tomorrow.