Oh frabjous day … I know it’s silly, but large parts of me were happy to hear that the deal between Performancing and Pay-per-Post has fallen through. While I wish good things for Nick & Co, I didn’t think that THIS deal was it. PPP has a lousy reputation amongst bloggers, and this seemed to many of us to be a blatant grab for a community – which just betrays PPP’s lack of “getting it”.

One of the reasons the blogosphere didn’t like it, I think, is that in this virtual world trust takes longer to build up. Without the benefits of proximity, face time, visual cues and physical evidence we take longer to lose our wariness, and knowing the fragility of this trust we are sensitive to events that threaten it. Things that might have worked better in the physical world (like the Microsoft/Acer “bribe”, and the Performancing/PPP deal) were doomed to derision by a lack of up-front honesty and transparency in this environment. The other problem for this sort of deal is that any hint of underhandedness gets called out very quickly – beware the Jabberwock indeed.

SO – I’m back on the Performancing blog editor – which will be re-branded as ScribeFire (although the link ultimately takes you to the Mozilla page for the “Performancing” extension still – no doubt the branding will change soon). The Metrics has gone (to Open Source – probably not a bad thing), so I have paid  heed to Fred Wilson. John T Unger and Nick Wilson, and ticked the box for Feedburner’s free stats service.

An update on the alternative editors – I discovered when posting from Zoundry that I was given some more tagging options – but I also noticed that the del.icio.us tagging didn’t actually make it there. I also tried Qumana again, but both of them suffered from one serious drawback – they don’t work behind a corporate firewall, because they don’t support proxies – Zoundry admit that, and purport to have been working on it for over a year, but my request for an update on the support forum hadn’t drawn a response after three days. While the idea of being able to create a blog post off-line may be appealing, I’m not “off-line” very often (and generally by choice rather than necessity) so I think I’ll take my chances on net availability to be able to share these pearls with you. As editors, both seemed quite capable, but not capable enough to tempt me away just yet.

Technorati Tags: Performancing, blogging, ScribeFire, Feedburner, trust, community, for:fredwilson, for:johntunger