Winer, who has offered free hosting to bloggers for the past four years, has promised to make exportable copies of blog contents available to the blogs’ owners at their request. He says it will take at least two weeks to provide copies of the blogs’ contents.

Meanwhile, the affected bloggers cannot access their work, a situation that angers many, who said they believed they should have been given advance notice that the Weblogs service would be terminated before their sites became inaccessible. —Michelle Delio —Thousands of Blogs Fall Silent  (Wired)

I noticed this as it was happening, and had planned to investigate and post a followup, but Clancy beat me to it.

I applaud those bloggers who remembered to thank Winer for the years of free service he provided, but I also sympathize with the bloggers who suddenly found themselves without access to an important part of their lives.