It’s funny the way things happen sometimes. After years of crying wolf, Evan Williams is now demoing Blogger Pro. Now we just wait to see if it actually gets launched.
I was talking to Clint by e-mail the other day about the lack of good blogging tools, despite how popular the activity has become. Blogger is unreliable in the extreme, Greymatter and Movable Type are hard to install and maintain, Radio is too techie (although it has potential), and CityDesk is on the right track but lacks some essential weblog functions.
Within a few months of the “personal web page” craze reaching the shores, there were tons of professional programs designed to help you make your own web page. But nothing similar happened with weblogs, even though the basic task is much simpler than even a webpage builder. I hope that situation changes in the next few months.
There’s a really good program, that seems to have been around for a while, but almost nobody seems to know about it. It’s called, confusingly enough, ‘Blog’.
It can be found at cyberian.tripod.com/Blog.htm.
I think the reason the tools haven’t gotten more widespread is two-fold:
1. Lots of cheap, easy personal web page tools led to lots of folks creating a personal web page. Which then sat there, unupdated and kind of dorky and folks got embarrassed by what they’d done. Which leads to …
2. A blog is more work than a personal web page. Personal web page, you throw up some pictures, some names, some e-mail links, maybe update it every year or two, and you’re done. A blog needs care and feeding, or else you’re just occasionally pissing into the wind. It’s also, at best, a concept that a lot of people have a problem with understanding (“Why do you do that?”).
I would add:
3. Personal page builders were popular when no one knew HTML. 5 years ago we didn’t have 14-yr-old’s that learned HTML when they were nine. Now HTML knowledge is so widespread, that all we really need is the updating software. Eventually M$ will come out with some Windows app for consumers that negaes the need for tools like blogger. But right now, it’s the simple dynamic updating that the general public stil needs help on.
[Using blogger for grins, but wrote my own comment engine!]
You know, for a split second I thought your link read “demon Blogger Pro.” I’m sure there’s a blog name in there somewhere…
Hey… When you say Blogger is unreliable, how much so do you mean? Whats the longest period of time it has been down for? I ask because I’ve been doing some work towards migrating my site to Blogger. Right now its “Powered by Notepad” which is becoming tiresome…
Well, Mad Bull, it just seemed like lately it was down often, and when it was up it could be extremely slow. The longest I think it was down was for about a half a day, if my memory serves (which it usually doesn’t).
But now with Blogger Pro, I believe those people are put on a separate server or at least given priority, so the $35/year seems like a bargain for that change alone.
how soon before we see sites all over the web with “powered by eightball”?