There's a thread of thought on the weblogs.com matter that's best expressed by MeFi's own Quonsar, albeit off the farm:

oh boo hoo. if you had taken blogging seriously enough to learn how to make a few lousy html tags and operate an ftp client and put your site on some paid hosting like any real site owner would do, you wouldn't now be screaming about 'murder'. TANSTAAFL. it means there aint no such thing as a free lunch. CentralizedShinyWidgets{tm} like weblogs.com and blogger.com pander to the willfully ignorant. murder? jesus, grow up. learn something. pay for hosting. buy a domain. get a real website.

Since he took the trouble to express that view several places, I'll assume he felt strongly about it. And I can't begin to communicate the contempt and scorn that a passage like that inspires in me. (Of course, that's what it's meant to do, so I suppose he achieved his end. Congrats.)

Of course, it's pretty much the equivalent of setting a technical bar for 'net participation. Let's break it down, kids: There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, so you've got to earn and learn like we did. You've got to run the man pages, Google 'til your fingers bleed, and figure it out on your own. And leave the 'net to Quonsar, me, and such friends as we deign to train.

It is an ownership society, after all, and knolwedge is (or at least, can be) wealth -- especially in Raymond's bazaar. We all have to pay to play, if not with cash, then with sweat-equity.

Or maybe it's just a sandbox where only the strongest kids get the kewlest toys, or a dive-bar where only the in-crowd gets the best seats at the bar. Either way, it's a place I choose not to play. I prefer a net where I can find some adult conversation instead of having to listen to the puerile maunderings of yet another technofetishist.

Of course not every credentialed geek is a puerile jerk. Some are quite literate; some (like me) got into these ridiculous devices in the first place with the mistaken idea that they would somehow help us be creative. (Damn, Drupal is stripping my sarcasm tags again...) And there are more and more of us all the time, at varying levels of technical sophistication. If we want our friends to play with us on the net, it behooves us to protect them from neanderthalish attitudes about technical gung-fu.