Where the blog platforms are going

Jason at Blogger — we’re playing catchup. The customer base isn’t web designers any longer, it’s the Geocities audience. New community features, stat-tracking. Scale a community directory. “Can it GoogleScale?” “my IP lawyer and PR person wouldn’t like that.”
Frankston. Uses blogger, and a homegrown tool.
Bricklin. Spreadsheet automated tedious housekeeping of writing a custom programming. We’re at the stage in blogging tools where Lotus 123 started to displace Visicalc. And we don’t know what Excel will look like. Pictures — that will be as important as the gridlines and formatting we got in excel.
Anil Dash. TypePad. Designed for basic users to create and host weblogs. We think the anatomy has been decided. Comments, trackback, permalinks, blogroll, images. None of our tools have kept up with managing those components. Working backward from the way people work with the format.
Michael Gartenberg at Jupiter. There are a variety of devices and platforms. Has anyone blogged on something other than PCs?
Next-generation Manila. Mail to weblog, server-level aggregation, built-in publishing. Make the interface easier to use. Radio. 2way synchronization, with multiple desktops, backups. Doing things you can only do on the client side adding a very slick mac and windows interface, instead of being inside a browser. P2P system, augment ability to publish large files form the desktop. First 10 people become resources for the next 100.
Anil. Choosing who can read what you publish? If you do that, is it a blog? Anil thinks so. Anil thinks you have a contract with your readers to update.
Doc. Blogger permalinks don’t work.Jason. It was a feature — most first blogs don’t work. Actually, permalinks will work on the new platform.
Question: How open is the code? Robb — everything but the core. Anil — any user can modify. MT Pro on schedule for this year, same license, with code exchange. Enterprise customers can share customizations. Evan — developers will become more important. Anil — javascript blogrolling will happen at API level instead of javascript.
Doc: wants to save pictures from home machine and serve from home machine. The cable guys have the vision of an asymmetrical web. Does blogging have the leverage to make the dream happen.
Rick Bruner: Wants Macromedia Lite for blogger. The answer is using those as front end tools, with an API. Can do this already in Radio. The HTML control is already in Trellix, there’s a gecko version. Works fine. Also pastes from HTML, and Word, and Excel.
Search and replace for regular expressions, feature to flag dead links.
Michael O’Connor Clarke: What about the reading tools?