Thanks to Roland Tanglao for pointing to this. It's dawning on more and more business people who have thought blogging is just *personal diaries* (as irving points out in his post) that this hyperlinked interconnected environment is not going away any time soon, and that through blogging much expertise is shared, relationships built and (soon) more and more purposeful activity gets done.
Qumana is squarely aimed at making it easy for people to do what they want, and to work easily with content. An earlier, jargon-y business plan of ours talked about content gathering, assembly, management and publishing ... this is still pertinent, but what we will continue to design and build (with our users' active feedback) is greater choice and control while enabling bloggers to build relationships with others and make money more easily.
Build relationships, you say ? Watch for an upcoming release where in addition to the rapid creation and publishing of blog posts (to multiple blogs, of course, the Qumana user will be able to drag and drop content into ... an email message that they can send on its way.
From irvingWladawsky-Berger's blog post titled Blogging, the Web and the Emergence of Collaborative Knowledge
I was honestly taken by surprise by the rise of blogging. My friend John Patrick , with whom I worked very closely at IBM in organizing our Internet initiative, had been telling me for years that blogging was one of the major next big directions for the Internet, right up there with ubiquitous wireless access. I honestly thought that John had lost it, but I now realize I was looking at blogging all wrong and asking all the wrong questions. I thought: "Who wants to read what I have to write when there are so many professional writers, experts in their subjects, publishing countless articles in newspapers, magazines, academic journals and books, let alone all the other stuff appearing every minute on the Web itself?" To me this all felt like an exercise in narcissism, with people writing on whatever subject they chose just to see their name in (electronic) print and get their 15 minutes (or hopefully longer) of fame.
What I had totally missed is that blogging should be viewed as one of the major natural next steps of the Web. The Web's appeal, as we were recently reminded in a very good article by Kevin Kelly in Wired Magazine is bigger, much bigger, than any one web site or web page. It is all about the content. The more content there is on the Web, and the more people access and interact with the content, the more valuable the Web is for everyone. In the early days of the Web, content was expensive to store, hard to find, and relatively difficult to produce, so web sites were put up primarily by businesses and other institutions. But, as computer storage has gotten ridiculously inexpensive, as search capabilities -- enabled by equally inexpensive computing technology -- make it easy to find whatever is out there, and as good tools for creating content become available to everyone, more and more of the content is now being contributed by individuals.
Technorati Tags : information+democracy, wirearchy
