Australian Telecommunications giant Telstra seem to have just launched a new blogging service in the last day sometime (although I’m yet to see it mentioned in the media yet). It’s called Telstra BigBlog and they are promoting it as:
‘BigBlog lets you share your thoughts, comments, stories, interests and adventures online. You can include words, photos, photo albums, video, sound, MMS photos and SMS text… your BigBlog can be whatever you make it.’
Of course when you go to ‘create blog’ you get taken to a page that says to ‘stay tuned’ as the service is ‘coming soon’.
It seems a rather odd way to get things running.
There are a few blogs live by the looks of things though. They all look pretty standard with a ‘BigBlog’ header across the top. I can’t say that I’m very impressed with what I’m seeing so far – most of those that I saw have a fairly ugly olive green colored template.
Maybe I’m just being skeptical about a big company with a poor reputation like Telstra getting into the blogging game but it all just seems rather odd and very wrong to me. Their own corporate blog is being used as an example of how not to blog in blogging case studies in many circles so I wonder how their blogging service will go down.
update: SMH has more news on BigBlog
Yes, I hate it once a company promotes something big, makes you want to signup right away, but they don’t want to accept signups then. Google does that a lot, and it makes me so mad! :(
Anyways, I guess this services is for those who just want a very basic blog due to this restriction:
“Up to 10MB free web space with BigPond membership”.
I saw this earlier over at Trevor Cook’s blog. Anyone have any idea as to what they are running behind the scenes? it looked a bit like a custom job to me??
I’m pretty sure it is custom development, I’ve had some contact with some of the people involved.
Well, I don’t know about the company or how it is with telecommunication companies in Australia, but I think this is a really smart move by them. If they can get it up and running and have a decent amount of their customers using this.
I don’t doubt that the features that will be promoted the most is services like “MMS photos and SMS comments direct from your mobile phone to your blog”. That’s an obvious way to have their customers use those mobile services more, and thereby make Telstra increase their revenue.
And if they get it going I guess that the 10mb limit will be changed, since they would earn more money the more content people post from their mobile phones.
Do any of you know if there are other tele-companies providing services like this already?
Telstra is so far behind and slow moving compared to companies like Google. We shouldn’t compare, but it is hard not to. I wish the Australian gov would move to make broadband cheaper in Australia, otherwise Australia will fall further behind. People like Darren show that Australians can become international successes. Perhaps if internet was more widespread, we could see more Aussies out there.
Again, Telstra is years late to the party.
That 10mb limit is nearly as archaic as their broadband plans.
[rant]
10gb is hardly UNLIMITED! – and 512/128 can hardly be called high-speed internet.
ugh.
[/rant]
The only reason they’re interested in this is for the upsell on content being delivered by SMS/MMS to the blogs.
Couple of things:
Stefan, as with everything to do with Telstra they are so late to the party its a joke
Mike,
it’s not the Governments role to make it cheaper, we’ve got to either take the infrastructure away from Telstra (ie split it into wholesale and retail, fully privatise the retail arm and make it compete like everyone else) or make it easier for competitors to get access in…and some are already, I cant get it where I am but you can get 8mb broadband in Perth through iinet for less that the cost of 512kps on Bigpong.
Pete
couldn’t agree more, funny that every other country in the world regards “broadband” as being 4-5mps +, yet Telstra calls in 256k! The download limits are also a joke, any where else in the world this wouldn’t be happening, for some reason there is a cosy acceptance in the industry in Australia to charge these fees, and yet its not repeated overseas. Ripe for an ACCC investigation in my books.
I have a 24MB ADSL here in Tokyo. 100MB fibre lines are also available for not much more in price. I can only laugh when I see restrictions on the monthly download limits in Australia.
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