Update Aug 24:  I decided to repost this with today's date to reflect two things.  First, Arieanna did a great job of putting the Qumana vs Word features in a table.  Second, since this week we released our latest version of Qumana that fixes the nagging Blogger titles problem and allows Blogger users to edit previous posts (just like the other blogging platforms), I think this puts this review in a new light.  When this was written the Blogger titles fix was in the queue.  We couldn't discuss when it might become available—doing so is the classic blunder to curse any release date—and it was a major gap and flaw.  It was then at the top of the queue, but still.  Now it's fixed.  So, I suggest try both apps.  See which one you like better.  And please if you have any more feedback, send it along, I love to hear it.

From Aug 16: Imitation is a sincere form of flattery, isn't it?

Today Biz Stone of Blogger announced a new add-on for MS Word that lets you post directly to Blogger. Bravo!

We've downloaded the add-on and tried it on a few posts on a little test blog I have on Blogger. The install was simple and straight forward; I didn't even need to reboot! Very nice touch.

Launch Word, and there are a few new buttons on the Toolbar (I'm using Word 2003, btw). A Blogger settings button, Open post ... , Save as draft, and Publish ... Simple, clean, straightforward. The Open post and Publish dialogs give you a pull-down menu of your Blogger blogs. Nice.Using this to cross-post to another Blogger blog looks easy. Blogger is certainly trying to make posting easier, but .. .
… it's only for Blogger. And, let's face it, while the HTML sent to Blogger isn't bad, you probably don't want to get too fancy with it. Also, the image I dropped into Word wasn't included in the post and there doesn't seem to be an option to upload one.

Congratulations to Blogger and Google on the effort. But we don't see this as a work-horse for most bloggers.. Word isn't really a simple, light application, and so might represent a degree of overkill when it comes to blogging. Blogger users, even new ones, may grow tired of using Word, whereas something that uses the best features of Word as they pertain to blogging .. and that’s all .. would be more blogger-friendly, if you will.

However, it does have it's place if you have a long Word doc you'd like to publish to Blogger.

Qumana does much of what Word does in terms of the text of a blog post, but has been designed to interact between the Web and the individual blogger’s style of writing and composing in ways that add to and support the individual’s blogging. It may be a better choice for many bloggers, and almost certainly gives you most or all of the functionality Blogger has offered with this new feature ... but for most other blogging platforms as well as Blogger.

Here are some additional things that Qumana does that add value to or support your blogging.

And don’t forget … we have a number of other easy-to-use and versatile new features coming along that add value specifically to the process of writing and composing blog posts.

Stay tuned.

Update: Tris has posted an update to this post, talking about some more of the conversation going on in the blogosphere surrounding this release. The conversation is turning more critical about the choice to use Word, since it is not overly good at HTML.

Like we state - it's a move in the right direction... but it's only a baby step towards simplification in self publishing. Hopefully our step is a little bit larger.

Technorati Tags: Blogger, Word, Qumana, Blogging