The hot news in the blog platform world, okay besides Blogware getting slaughtered with comment spam last week, is TypePad 2.0 or Comet.  Maybe Comet is going to be an option for TypePad users.  I hope so.  Anyway, following the famous "Mom test" as in "so easy my mom can use it" ... Mena Trott Demo-ed Comet with her mom.  That's cool.  From the sounds of it, Comet is going to aiming for increasing the connectivity between groups, drawing lines between public and private.

I think Comet is a great evolution in blogging, and I look forward to making sure Qumana will be able to work seamlessly with it.  From what I've seen and read I think Comet will truly bring the family website into reality.  How many times have we tried this before?  I think this might be the ticket.  Being able to have the family photos, notes, stories, news, in one place, but also having the public side too.  Yes, that's great.  The proof will be the ease of use and, speed.  Let's not forget speed.  Mom and dad aren't going to have kick butt machines.

The Blogosphere needs, and dare I say loves, this kind of innovation.  Yes, some folks might decry the lack of "purity", but this is a great evolution of the medium.  Pulling all kinds of multi-media and Web 2.0 features together.

From Mena's blog this is how she describes the evolution and goal of Comet:

We went through all her concerns and showed how “Comet” addresses them. First, she does have things to say — she emails me and calls me constantly. If she was just to write about the family, she’d have more than enough content. But if she was to write about the family, she’d feel uncomfortable about anyone being able to read it. Therefore, we’ve provided privacy options that let only certain groups read your content. Not only that, but we provide views from the groups she has set up in dynamically driven pages that can be organized by keywords and topics. And finally, we’ve built in aggregation in both the application and the “published” pages.

 

We’ve taken the stuff we’ve learned from the community features of LiveJournal and mixed them with the publishing features of Movable Type and TypePad. And we’ve made it extremely media-rich. Adding photos, audio, books and music reviews, etc... is as easy as dragging and dropping files into your posting screen.

See?  Evolution, innovation.  This is cool.

I did a quick search and this is a selection of commentary and sources on Comet ... catch it.

• Six Apart - Project Comet
• TechCrunch » Web 2.0 This Week (September 18-24)
• Niall Kennedy's Weblog- More TypePad 2.0 details

• PubSub to Measure Blog Influence by Category
• Blog Buzz News- PubSub Improvements Coming ...
• PubSub to Measure, Categorize Blog and Site Influence

I love new features from FeedBurner, especially free ones!  Last week they announced PingShot a new pinging service—Burning Questions - The Official FeedBurner Weblog- PingShot.  Pinging, of course, is when your blog server software let's the rest of the world know "Hey!  There's something new here ... come on down!"  Typically this is done automatically, and by default, by the major services.  Also when you DIY it, also is easy to turn on.  Now, why is this different?  This ping service is tied to your FeedBurner-burned feed.  Meaning that instead of your server giving the world your other feed address ... it all focuses on FeedBurner.  This lets you gather better stats from them.  I think this might be why, come to think of it, that both the Qumana blog and View from the Isle's FeedBurner circulation freaking exploded on Friday.  So here are the key features of PingShot:

• Podcast-Sensitive (as in, it by default pings the podcast directories)
• Open Registry (as in, all engines are welcome)
• Spam! (as in, this can't become a tool for the Dark Side)
• Determining Default Services (you choose who you ping).

Now for a beginning blogger and the beginning pro blogger you can't underestimate the importance of a good pinging service.  Pinging is one of the ways your blog will get found.  As a pro blogger this is incredibly key.  Remember, as a pro part of your job is also to increase traffic to the blog.  If you don't ping ... they won't come.

Arieanna continues with Part 2 of the results of our blogging survey focused on RSS and RSS readers.  In another post I'm going to talk about the relationship between time blogging and feeds read, but this one is on RSS readers.  I've lost count of the number that I've tried and keep trying.  Yes, Lektora is my favourite (it is a real Victor Kiam story), but I know that it isn't perfect.  So I keep trying other readers to see what other's are doing and get inspired.  You can see from the chart at on the right that while Bloglines is the largest single player (and I, frankly, use it myself to search feeds.), there is a huge amount of fragmentation out there  I think people are still trying to figure out how best to present feed information.  We have web-based browser-based, we have browser-based, but offline.  Outlook integrated.  Standalone.  Wow.  What is the best way?  Personally I like browser-integrated, but offline.  I also like being able to skim fast through feeds.

This tells me that there is room for a breakthrough.  A new metaphor for reading news.  A new way to integrate the data you receive with your routine, your thinking, and your work.  Do I have the answer?  Nope.  I'm still looking.  I think I've tried most on the RSS readers on that chart in the past month ... all for like the second or third time.  Just to look at improvements, to understand.  Any one have suggestions?  What makes a great news reader for you?

Technorati Tags : RSS+aggregators, Lektora, Qumana