Blogging friends,

As Geoffrey Moore (no relation, except in management thought lineage) 
emphasizes, products and industries often must change as they seek to 
“cross the chasm” from selling to early adopters to becoming part of 
the daily life of mainstream users.

I'd like to see millions more bloggers.

 From my vantage point, blogging is facing its chasm.  Despite strong 
absolute numbers and growth rates, our total share penetration of the 
computer and Internet world is tiny.  For example, when I tried to find 
Iowa bloggers to put into BloggerStorm and Iowa Caucus News, I could 
only locate a few handfuls.  I was in Microdesign yesterday—this is the 
big computer store near MIT—and there is no shrinkwrapped software that 
even references blogging, with the exception of Microsoft Frontpage, 
which does so deceptively in relation to Sharepoint.

I would like to see an all out effort to make the use of blogging 
software mainstream.  With that in mind, here are my candidates for new 
developments:

Improve and simplify editing:  Drag and drop posting of photos, 
audio/music, and video, within the basic central editor.  Spell 
checking, thesaurus, easy posting of links.  Overall, take WYSIWYG to 
the modern level. Current editors are a lot closer to Wordstar circa 
1984 than to Microsoft Word of today.

Improve and simplify aggregating. Make aggregators available 
freestanding.  Stop emulating complex email clients such as Outlook.  
Instead, build on the simple  Manila-style aggregator format.  Post 
most recent first, and display whatever a person wants in terms of 
headlines, summaries, and full posts.

Put development resources into ease: of subscribing:  auto discovery of 
feed urls, one-click subscribe and unsubscribe.

Improve how aggregators handle photos, audio/music, and video, 
especially in relation to getting content from the server to display 
without end-user intervention.  For example. Improve auto-display and 
auto-run, auto-discovery of the media player being used, and 
auto-choice of file size/compression.

Put more effort into evangelizing blogging.  IBM contributed a great 
deal to the spread of personal computing in the 80s by making available 
retail stores and business consultants.  Blogging needs to do whatever 
the 2000s version of this is, in order to mainstream itself.

Finally, consider changing the name.  Blogging may seem a warm and 
inviting term to those of us who are initiates, but I think that market 
research would document that the term is strange and off-putting to 
outsiders.  Blogging, in my view, is a word that is a closer analogue 
to “cold, dead fish” than to “sushi.”

Best,

Jim Moore

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jim

On Tuesday, February 24, 2004, at 08:17  AM, Dave Winer wrote:

> This is a question for a selected group of non-developer bloggers. If 
> you want to pass this on to people whose opinion you respect, please 
> do.
> 
> Premise: We've reached a plateau in blogging tools. There haven't been 
> a lot of changes in the last two or three of years. The growth 
> continues, lots more weblogs, and we've got better tools for reading 
> (aggregators).
> 
> Question: What's next in writing tools for weblogs? If you could 
> influence people who are making the tools, what feature or features 
> would you want? Think as big as you like, or as detailed as you like. 
> What bug is most in your way. Ramble, please. Is there one thing you'd 
> kill for? Or perhaps you're satisfied with the tools as they are. I 
> hope your comments are on the record so I can assemble a quote sheet 
> as the beginning of a conversation that I hope will yield better tools 
> for all of us.
> 
> This is part of my background work for the next BloggerCon, 
> tentatively scheduled for April 10. You'll be getting an invite 
> shortly once the date is firm.
> 
> Dave