their positioning is precarious in that they're at the mercy of the platform providers. sixapart or automattic (they did buy a similar company) can come up with

their positioning is precarious in that they're at the mercy of the platform providers. sixapart or automattic (they did buy a similar company) can come up with official comment systems with better support. livejournal doesn't even let them add on third party software. the flipside of course being that they're platform agnostic and third party they're capable of bridging the community at large and there's certainly value in being able to be a telephone instead of the telephone service provider but how do you monetize this whole thin? the only provider that has the power to monetize would be the blog software providers and even they have trouble doing that.