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My Blog Functionality Scorecard
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1.
WYSIWYG text editing and publishing
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11.
content sorting/searching/indexing |
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2.
automatic conversion from/to other formats
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12.
integrated conference scheduler |
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3.
abstracting
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13.
integrated VoIP (with v-mail)
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4.
auto-publishing when saving or sending
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14.
integrated video |
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5.
access to rest of personal 'filing cabinet'
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15.
integrated collaboration
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6.
one-click subscription by anyone
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16.
integrated IM
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7.
integrated universal address book
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17.
integrated
slideshow |
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8.
integrated expertise/network finder
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18.
integrated
soundtrack |
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9.
editable by others
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19.
integrated URL directory |
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10.
robust commenting
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20.
posting multimedia presentations |
Everyone has their own specifications for what they'd like blogs to
do.
Advanced users, comfortable with the technology and able to tweak
their
blogs to do some amazing (and some silly) things, are quickly leaving
the rest of us behind, and there are millions of others who took a
quick try at blogging, threw up their hands, and gave up.
This article is an attempt to create a scorecard of what blogs can and
cannot presently do, and what they should be able to do. The objective
is to spec out a blogging tool that is better (more useful), faster
and simpler, at
next to no cost.
My benchmark for this scorecard is my father. If I could explain to
him
how to use a blog feature over the phone, it gets a 'green' score. If my
brother, who lives a few blocks away from him and is an engineer,
could
set it up for him so he could use it, it gets a 'yellow' score. If
it's not available at all, or unfathomable to novice users even with
help, it gets a 'red'
score.
I consider blogs to be rudimentary content management, publishing,
communication and social networking tools. So I have taken the content
management, publishing and social networking functionalities that I
identified as critical in my Personal
Knowledge Management chart, and added the functionalities implicit
in my Communicati
ons
Decision Chart, along with some intriguing additional features
that
readers have told me about recently, and these 20 functionalities
together make up the scorecard. If you think important functions are
missing, or some of the functions I've listed are trivial, let me
know.
No list will satisfy everyone, of course. Here's the explanation for
my scores.
- WYSIWYG text editing and publishing - Most blog tools
have
got this right. Even the novice can write a text post and get it into
the format they want, without training. Anything fancy still needs
HTML, but graphics, tables, different font sizes and styles are all
very simple, and show you what you get when you push the 'publish'
button.
- Automatic
conversion from/to other formats - Anyone writing
a paper in MS Word and then trying to get it into shape to publish on
their blog is in for a rude awakening. If you're lucky, Microsoft will
simply bloat your post to twice the size it needs to be, replete with
hidden HTML coding that is unique to MS apps and won't display
properly
with other browsers. If you're unlucky, you'll need to spend hours
stripping out the extra code and correcting all the quote mark
mis-conversions that clutter your 'converted' post with question marks
and strange MS Gibberish. And, going the other way, converting your
HTML post into a professional looking report or printout is also a
challenge.
- Abstracting
- For very long posts, most blog tools
currently require you to prepare two documents: a short abstract,
preamble or excerpt, which you publish, and the full article, which
you
save on the server as a 'story' which the abstract links to. The
technology should simply allow you to highlight, just before
'publishing', which parts of a long post you want readers to see on
your main blog, and should then provide a 'toggle' that alternately
displays the entire post or the selected excerpts. I know this can be
done with 'outlining' features, but I also know a lot of these
features
are hard to learn.
- Auto-publishing
when saving or sending - A blog is really
just another 'address', another destination to send something to.
Ideally, we should be able to post any document or message to our blog
as easily, and at the same time, as we 'save' it (send it to a file)
or
'send' it to an e-mail address. Radio Userland does allow me to type
in
individual e-mail addresses to 'ping' when I publish an article, but
it's awkward, and the last thing you want is something else to have to
look up at the last minute before you publish an article. Userland
also
allows me to (with some important limitations) send a post to my blog
via e-mail. Quite
often I end up replying to a reader's comment both on my blog and via
a
separate e-mail (since I get e-mail notification of all comments on my
blog); this should be something I can do with one action instead of
two.
- Access to rest of personal 'filing cabinet' -
Particularly
in business applications, we need to be able to provide the reader
with
access to supporting documents, messages and files used in the
preparation of an article, report or presentation. For those that keep
their blogs on a public server, that means addition of peer-to-peer
connectivity so that readers of my blog can also get access to a
'public' folder on my laptop (when I'm online). As an intermediary
step, we need some way, and place, to put background documents that we
aren't
'publishing' but do want people to be able to link to to if they're
interested in more.
- One-click
subscription by anyone - I have sent quite a few
people to RSS aggregators who simply want to get my posts in their
daily e-mail. I know I can set this up through Bloglet, and that for
people
who understand RSS this isn't a big deal, but for most readers it is.
You need a 'subscribe' button at the top of your blog that lets
non-techie readers get your blog content sent to their or a friend's
e-mail, with step-by-step
instructions on how to use an RSS aggregator if they're up for that
instead. And you need an 'e-mail' button below each post that allows
the reader to e-mail to themselves, or someone else, any individual
article.
- Integrated universal address book - Someone needs to set up
a universal address book that allows us to manage all our contacts --
where we can add, and access, e-mail, phone, URL, IM and other contact
information with a single click. We waste too much time looking for
this information in separate, incompatible, awkward
applications.
- Integrated expertise/network finder - As many
have said,
LinkedIn, Orkut, Ryze etc. just don't do it. When we're searching for
information while researching an article, or trying to decide who else
might be interested in something we've just written or just read, we
need to be able to call up a list of who knows and who cares about a
particular subject.
- Editable by others - Yes, there are group
blogs, but for
most of us the ability to collaborate on an article, or allow someone
else to post as a 'guest' on our blog, and edit and manage their post,
is not available. It should be. It isn't that difficult a technical
challange.
- Robust commenting - Unless you're an HTML whiz,
commenting
is limited to typing in sentences. You can't edit or delete comments
(in most commenting systems), you can't number the comments for
reference, you can't clearly indicate comments-to-comments, you can't
easily refer back to specific parts of the article you're commenting
on
or cross-reference to other URLs. I know this is tough, and the
discussion boards have proven there's no easy answer to this, but it's
important and needs to be solved. See the postscript to this post for
one possible answer.
- Content sorting, searching, indexing - Most of us
have
learned how to add a search bar to our blogs, and some of us keep
detailed tables of contents or indexes of our posts and to use
categories to post on different subjects. But the fact that we can
only
display our content in reverse date order (rather than by subject, by
author etc.) is frustrating. And the calendaring/archiving function is
awkward -- once a post has dropped off the home page, it can be very
hard to find it again, even if you know roughly when it was posted.
I've been told that MyS
t Technologies allows more robust content sorting, and takes a
more holistic view of blogs as content management systems than
others.
- Integrated conference scheduler - Blogs are by nature an
asynchronous communication medium. In order to bridge to synchronous,
real-time communication, blogs need a 'scheduler' that will allow the
blogger to indicate when, and via which tools, he is available for
conferences. And in those time blocks that are open for face-to-face
meetings,
this scheduler would also show the blogger's physical location at
those
times (I'd love to know when bloggers are going to be in the Toronto
area, for example). The scheduler could even include a pricing feature
so that, if the blogger is someone who makes a living from his
personal
expertise, people willing to pay for a slice of their time can do so.
Whether it's for fee or for free, the reader could then book a time
and
a tool, and the blogger would be notified by e-mail and automatically
reminded shortly before the meeting. And functions 13-16 below would
become
much easier to accommodate effectively.
- Integrated VoIP - Skype is my choice for VoIP --
free,
one-click and crystal clear. But it's not yet available on Macs or on
non-Windows or pre-Win2k operating systems. And it needs a voice-mail
box for missed calls.
- Integrated video - Maybe I'm spoiled by DVDs, but the
jerkiness, tiny picture and/or fuzziness of the pictures on all of the
simple, easily-affordable video technologies I've looked at just
doesn't do it. All I should have to do is turn on my webcam and my
real-time image should show up in a designated place on my blog
sidebar. That'll take a few years for bandwidth and technology to
improve, but when you can tune in ('eavesdrop') on a blogger's video
and voice real-time whenever they're online, it will change the nature
of the blogging experience.
- Integrated collaboration -
Especially for business blogs,
it would be wonderful to be able to post a 'space' on your blog where
others, appropriately permissioned, could add to or annotate, in an
identifiable way, anything put in that space. Kind of like a wiki
within a blog. As a tool used in tandem with an audio or
video-conference or real-time IM session, it could be an amazing tool
for effective teamwork. And possibly even an interesting 'spectator
sport' for those interested but not permissioned.
- Integrated
IM - Quite a few bloggers have squawk boxes in
their sidebars for spontaneous chat, but none of these is integrated
into the blog tool. Also, they don't give you enough real estate for
intelligible discussion. With the scheduler (#12 above) bloggers could
announce discussions at specific times on their blogs and these could
become powerful brainstorming tools, and make some blogs into
real-time destinations.
- Integrated slideshow - This intriguing
feature, as well as
#18 and #19 below, are now available through The Blogbox Project. They're great
examples of non-essential but useful features to add to a blog as long as they don't add
complexity.
The integrated slideshow shows a sequence of repeating graphics in a
single place on your blog sidebar, saving you real estate and adding a
bit of animation to your site, especially with the transition effects
(including pans and fades)
included.
- Integrated soundtrack - Blogbox allows you to let
your
readers hear your favourite MP3s as background music while they read.
See (or should I say hear) Séb
Paquet's blog for an example,
- Integrated
URL directory - And the final Bloxbox extra is a collapsable, sorted
list of your favourite URLs that you can use for your blogroll or
other
reference lists. I think blogrolls are important -- sometimes they're
the most useful part of a site -- but they do take up a lot of real
estate and this simple, elegant 'outlining' tool solves that
problem.
- Posting multimedia presentations - Rather than
attaching a
PPT file, or a video or sound clip, which the user must then open in a
separate window, it would be very useful, especially on business
blogs,
to be able to have the files open and run right in the blog
window.
Functions 7, 8, 10 and 15 would admittedly be difficult for blog tools
to
incorporate, but the rest of the functions on the scorecard should not
be difficult to implement, and despite the additional power would
actually make blogging easier and more intuitive. Their addition would
make blogs true personal content management and social networking
tools, and make them immensely more attractive to business and to
non-technical individuals. We are likely to see the convergence of PC
and TV technology this decade, and that means PC applications will
have
to become simpler and more straightforward. I would even anticipate
that by 2010 we will have one
easy-to-use, integrated personal content management and social
networking tool that will encompass e-mail, blogging,
videoconferencing, browsing, and the publishing of and subscription to
multimedia content of all types, from movies and music and TV
programming to the customized daily paper and your favourite
greatly-enhanced blogs. It will make personal electronic information
management as easy and intuitive as the management of paper documents
it supercedes. And much more powerful.
PS - If you'd like to try out
an alternative to the blog Comments Thread, here's a more robust
discussion space, courtesy of QuickTopic:
Discuss Pushing
the Blogging Envelope
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