Can Google save Soapblox?

Soapblox, a proprietary CMS which hosts about 100 left-wing blogs (mainly state operations running on a shoestring) fell to a hack attack on January 7 and went down.

On the left panic ensued. As Chris Bowers of OpenLeft explained, in a note asking for contributions:

Soapblox has offered most of the features available on sites like Daily Kos and MyDD: user diaries, recommended diaries, promoted diaries, interactive comments, comment ratings, tip jars, and even things like quick hits. It is a lot of functionality for not much price.

In 2008, Bowers wrote, some 50 million Soapblox pages were served, with site managers paying just $15/month.

One of the first suggestions made after Soapblox went down was to switch to Drupal. Drupal is stable, it's open source, and if something goes wrong there's a community to help get you back running, a technical rather than a political one.

Making all this newsworthy here is word that Google has now released the first version of Blog Converter, a Python program that can be run via command line, a Windows batch script, or the Google App Engine.

Google's J.J. Lueck writes on the readme file he's part of Google's data liberation front, but the joke is on many long-time bloggers such as me.

I have a personal blog. I have written there for four years. What if my host went down or I wanted to find a better deal? What if I wanted new features my host didn't have?

Despite the fact my host software is open source, I'm as stuck as any Oracle scaled enterprise. All of which leads me to propose one of my favorite things, a business model.

The BlogConverter is perfect for a SaaS model. If WordPress wants me, they can hand the job to Google, which has the technical chops needed for the job. I'd be thrilled to write a check for such a service.

Meanwhile, what of Soapblox? President Paul Preston, wrote writes under the nom de blog Pacified, says everything is now OK. New features are coming, along with a more businesslike structure.

But as keen as Preston may be, his bloggers are still his customers, and as customers they must ask the hard question. What happens next time? What if it's not a script kiddie, but a dedicated operation that doesn't like my politics?

Help me, Google wan kenobi, you're my only hope.

UPDATE: The move to create a Soapblox alternative based on Drupal is officially underway.