Weblogging into the future.
(warning: low sleep ramble ahead)
There's a been a lot of buzz in parts of the weblogging world leading up to today. Radio 8.0 was released (very) early this morning by Userland Software. It's actually pretty cool. I think for the beginning weblogger it would be quite cool.
But while weblogging is somewhat like radio broadcasting (Adam Curry), I think there are some different levels to the whole thing also. It is like pirate radio broadcasting. Adam talks about building his own transmitter when he was a kid. And this is much more how I see the whole blogging experience. I look at sights like Alexa's or zannah's and there's a level of creativity going on there beyond text. These are the sites that are as much about style as they are content (IMHO). My one problem with Userland sites so far is that they tend to all look pretty close to the same.
Things like Radio and Moveable Type are really exciting to me. They are taking the concept of something like Blogger and working on ways to give users even more control over things like presentation and content.
The hard part for me is that currently, every product out there does a portion of what I want. Movable Type has lots of keen features, but I find myself looking towards some of their new features. Radio is the one that I'm most curious about. I have so many questions as I look at it. How easy is it to build my own template, how easy is it to basicly rebuild my current site using it. I have a lot of things i do with my blog, little things like the 'cookies' or comments. They don't get a ton of use, but I do like them being a part of my site.
The other thing I don't know (and hopefully someone can share with me) is how radio works at the publishing level. One of the options you have is publishing to the radio servers. You also have the opportunity to publish via FTP to anywhere you want (can we hope for scp support soon??). The next question I have is, how do I publish when I'm away from home? The one nice thing about blogger is that I can connect to the service from work or home or my parent's place. It doesn't matter where I am. This isn't quite as much as an issue to me because I have a laptop, but for people who blog a lot and only have a PC at home this makes something like Radio less useful (or am I missing something).
Adam, I know you peek over here now and then and are a pretty serious Radio user. If you're reading right now, care to comment? Or any good pointers to resources? Is there anyone else who reads here who can answer that stuff?
All this has also got me thinking about how I blog. I like what zannah does, where she has a number of different blogs that reflect different aspects of things she writes about. /usr/bin/girl is mostly about links, voxmachina is just random moments from her life, and so on. The thing is I don't know is if I could keep up with it all (sometimes I wonder how she does it!).
So this is where I am right now, lots of thinking on this subject, lots of not really coming up with answers, lots of me just rambling after getting only 4 hours of sleep.
