Think, for a moment, about how and why you write. Writing is something we learn in school early, as we learn the alphabet, as we learn how to read, and as our young and malleable brains are shaped (for better or worse) into thinking tools.

We are taught using a paper and a pencil or pen. Think about how we use our thoughts, our respective capabilities with words and verbal expression, and the pen or pencil as it meets paper as the interface with the medium where those thoughts get expressed. This is a complex and primarily unconscious process for most of us.

The use of a computer and the keyboard for writing is actually quite a new phenomenon for us humans. We've begun the process of learning how to *write* - how to express ourselves - using these new tools only during the past fifteen years or so. Until quite recently we have been *prisoners* of the tools that have been available to us, namely MS Word and email interfaces. Blogging is even more recent, and we have writing tools - blog editors - that consist of small boxes with relatively complex and ungainly interfaces.

There's quite a bit of recent activity that makes thinking, linking, annotating and writing easier, and Qumana fits squarely into the recent advances. One of the primary goals of Qumana's design was to make creating and publishing a blog post as easy, or easier, than creating and sending an email note .. and we believe we have succeeded.

For example, with Qumana operating on your system, if you have a thought or an idea and want to create a blog post .. just double-click on the Qumana DropPad, the editor (which bears quite a resemblance to MS Word) opens up and can be sized to full screen if you wish. Then, start typing. The user has a full-blown WYSIWYG editor available.

If you have several ideas and want to work on them .. hey, you can have multiple windows open. The blog posts that you create can be published to different blogs .. just choose the one you want to post to and as long as it has been loaded into your Qumana, there you go.

Over time, Qumana may become recognized as the equivalent of the ballpoint pen for Web 2.0 .. an easy and almost unconscious way of being able to move from thought to idea to expression to publishing that idea .. onto a blog or to an email ... the digital equivalents of pieces of paper, letters, pamphlets.

All in all, a new way of writing for the Web.