Note to the Possibly Perplexed:

Apparently, Xanga has decided that the ability to add a background image to your blog is now a Premium Feature only (*imagines the screams from the non-Premies*).  If you have Premium, you can restore your image at the bottom of the "Look and Feel" module.  If you don't have Premium, I guess the message is: "Do without--or Get It."  But, hey, remember, I'm just the messenger--I didn't devise the message!

Additionally, it appears that Premium members can now easily add music to the blog, again, at the bottom of the "Look and Feel" module. 

So What's the Strategy?  Well, I once taught a course in Economics at Graduate level in college. So let me, with a trained but now rusty outlook, attempt a metaphorically foreshortened economic analysis of this services realignment as I think that the BlogTeam may see it :

Only Premium can do backgrounds anymore. By this, we at Xanga are sending a message:

We don't value Free subscribers as much anymore.  If losing your background wants to make you quit, we'll miss you, but Godspeed. 

Non-converting Free membership was increasing exponentially and the resulting inordinately ever-higher ratio of Free/Premium membership was becoming financially and technically unsustainable anyway. 

By making Free less attractive (and Premium, by comparison, more attractive) we hope to induce your conversion to Premium, and expect some to make this conversion, thus helping to secure the ongoing finances needed to sustain and expand our community. 

If you do not opt for Premium and decide to stay with diminished options, that's OK with us.  If you instead decide to leave (or never join), as we expect some will, that's fine, too, since you thereby reduce the ratio of Free/Premium membership thus making this operation more cost effective. 

Basically, there's only so much to share of this ever-more popular cyber-pie and we decided by this readjustment to better assure that our paying subscribers are not negatively impacted by a strain from comparatively too-attractive , tumultuously-growing Free subscriptions.

Remember: With a free lunch you don't always get desert.  And as the number of free-lunchers rapidly grows, while the growth of the cyber-pie continues but slower, you should expect the scarcer deserts to first go to the paying diners. But don't feel bad: We're still giving you one helluva free lunch, if that's all you want.

Shameless Marketing Ploy of the Day:  I just received another AOL 7.0 CD proclaiming that it’s “NEW”.  Well, version 7.0 isn’t exactly new, so what is it that their claiming as “NEW”?  Aha!  They are now offering 1025 hours “free” for 45 days instead of the old, stingy 1000 hours “free” for 45 days.  Well, seeing that 45 days only has 1080 hours to begin with, that leaves only 55 hours over 45 days when I can’t be online.  Whoopee!  So instead of the previous tightfisted average of  22.22 hours per day I can now spend a much more openhanded 22.78 hours per day on AOL during my free trial period!  Ain’t that a cat’s meow?!

Minor Pet Peeve:  The Xanga “Search” function is broken again.  It seems that this function is about as reliable as an old used car whose spark plugs are constantly fouling due to piston wear failure so that unless you pull, clean, and reset them every couple of days, you’re bound to grovel with predictable dysfunction.

Yet the real shame is that there’s no fallback to other established search engines such as Google to peruse one’s pages either.  Sure, Google provides a lot of hits for “Xanga” and for specific blog-names, too.  But the contents of one’s blog seem to go unspidered and thus remain part of the “Dark Internet”, i.e., information and pages on the internet that cannot be searched or located by any public domain search engines.   That’s fine if you prefer more privacy (but then why do you blog publicly to begin with?), but a drawback if you’re seeking to popularize your ideas. 

So you could originate an idea or coin a term here on Xanga that someone else could “borrow” and popularize in the “Light” (i.e., public domain searchable) Internet, and others searching for the originator/creator of the idea or term could end up crediting the “borrower” rather than you here on “Dark” Xanga. 

I suppose one way around this would be to “mirror” one’s posts on a searchable/regularly-spidered domain.  I’m not sure right now if having one’s own domain (such as fairestc’s  www.christydawn.com) sponsored through Xanga brings it into the Light or not.  I shall begin an investigation forthwith!

More than a thought:  It’s estimated that there are about 1 million words in the English language.  In your venerated estimation, is such a surfeit inducing gratuitous loquaciousness or a dearth hampering the potential for further perspicuity ?