News.com is reporting that BloggerPro is now free, because Google thinks that weblogs are good for the internet.

Of course, I do agree that weblogs are good for the Internet, but I'm not sure that free weblogs are that good. The scenario that seems to come out is that there are two different kind of blogging tools "vendors": companies charging for their tools (such as UserLand or Six Apart) and companies offering free blogs because their core business relies on something else (traffic, advertising, registered users, etc.), so they can afford to offer free service.

Now, my doubt is that companies offering free tools are not compelled to improve their offering because they already have a very strong "selling" point: they are free.

So far we have seen most of the innovation coming from small players and very often innovation is related to defining new standards. If free tools vendors don't support these new standards, given the huge number of users they have (because they are free), they can stop or significantly delay the adoption of these standards thus slowing down innovation.