Le Monde moves to WordPress

Who says the French don’t know what they’re doing? I wasn’t surprised to see Le Monde move to WordPress. In fact, I was surprised to see them on Typepad in the first place.

Le Monde just relaunched their blogging services. Their several thousand blogs are now powered by WordPress (they used to be on TypePad).

Why would a large French media organisation want to hamstring their operation with a cooperation with a closed-source American company which would like to become the Microsoft of weblogs?

Answer: they got out as soon as they got a chance. Good move.

For example Skipper had about the same negative experience of Typepad which I’ve had (and continue to have):

We cancelled our paid Typepad account about a week ago, after only 3 months of use. After using the typepad for only a few months, it became clear that we could not continue to run a professional people search and public record blog for our visitors using their unreliable service.

We installed WordPress directly on our site at http://www.skipease.com/blog and couldn’t be happier. We got out just in time to save our blog information, but now we are 3 months behind in building our traffic thanks to Typepad.

New and experienced bloggers would do well to take the time to register a domain name of their own and install WordPress or other blogging software directly on server space provided by a reliable service provider. We should have done that right from the beginning.

Absolutely right.

As I mentioned to Anil Dash recently, the only thing Typepad could have going for it over any other weblog system right now is support. And due to the shoddy support from Brenna and her crew, they don’t even have that.

As usual the rot starts from the head, the head of Typepad Doug Bryan being extraordinarily unhelpful. Instead of issuing instructions for someone to enable a couple of templates for me (five minutes work), Doug Bryan turned in into a three week correspondence course on how not to help customers.

Unbelievably shoddy service.