Microsoft and Blogging

Robert Scoble who joined Microsoft earlier this year has jotted down some interesting thoughts on blogging [1]. Actually he is more talking about what people turns in to use this or that software. As Robert says, the question that arises is simply

How do I get started, what tool do you recommend?

As he says poeple do not really evaluate products at all, but selecting the same as the professionals do (e.g. Photoshop ) or in words of the bloggerworld, people like Dave Winer, Mark Pilgrim. He mentions Live Journal, TypePad, Radio UserLand et al.

I once tried Radio UserLand but did not feel too comfortable with it. I can not tell for sure, where I heard or read about it; probably at a \”Big Bloggers\” site 😉 Anyway, earlier this year I came across cafelog/b2 based on PHP and MySQL, quite familiar to me. b2 has some great features but also some drawbacks. Christian Stocker and myself did quite some tuning on this tool and while we concretized the news handling for the PHP User Group we were close to enhance b2, not saying to fork it. But the code is pretty messy and so we did not. Maybe those drawbacks were another reason to write a new blogging software from the scratch, which finally lead to Kaywa [2]. I am sure we will soon be able to promote those tools to blog-novices as we have now an answer to the question above.

And yes, as Robert says, it might be that still nowadays – while blogging has made enormous steps forward the past few months – people like to go for a solution that the \”Big Bloggers\” promote or use. Nevertheless, there are bloggers like Urs Müller, having partly different motivations to choose a blog software or eventually write an own [3].

Probably Robert could have a chat with Urs to get his blogging-code to have an alternative for his UserLand blog 😉

[1] http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2003/09/21.html
[2] http://www.kaywa.com
[3] http://www.compisoft.ch/BLOG/Default.aspx?EntryId=a9ff742e-fdcf-4c6e-a294-3167c3424e83

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