Brij’s One More Idea | BlogIT and MessageDance’s anywhere-to-anywhere publishing model

Brij’s One More Idea

Brij Singh’s weblog about entrepreneurship

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BlogIT and MessageDance’s anywhere-to-anywhere publishing model

By Brij ⋅ April 17, 2008 ⋅

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I am going out on a limb here. I will try to deal this in a blogger-to-blogger tone. As a co-founder of bootstrapped startup I realize how hard it is to get lead blogger’s attention. It’s equally hard to execute on Howard Aiken’s famous quote - “if your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”.

Last week we rolled out something which we believe is the direction industry will eventually move towards. Idea of allowing content publishing from any website to any website. We proved this by demonstrating how this can be done using Amazon, Facebook, leading email services and RSS reader such as Google Reader. There are many more we are working on but that’s not the point here.

Yesterday Six Apart announced BlogIT, which seems to be a step in the right direction. Leading vendors see the user motivation here and clearly see that there is no point guessing which way user will go next. Simple answer is anywhere. Facebook, Twitter or your favorite life-streaming startup (enough on that one). Soon we will see Typepad posting from Wordpress.com. Users want it and vendors will have to support competing services. This is the new competitive landscape in digital media space.

Marshall thinks this is the beginning of next big thing.

The service could be more fully developed but it’s certainly in the lead compared to other services aiming to do the same thing. A close look at the details leads us to believe that this could be a much bigger move than it might seem to be. Here’s a few reasons why we believe it’s so interesting

He believes this example throws interesting twist to the growing identity problem. He is probably right. What he is not talking about is user motivation. Users want freedom. As in having easy bookmark capability, as in having easy sharing options below all blog posts, as in many one-click one-time operations. Plain old productivity motivation trumps identity pain. At least in the short run.

John thinks this move by Six Apart adds to the overall open social promise:

BlogIt is a very cool tool that embraces one of the foundational notions of the open Social Web: that once someone gets into using one social application, they will quite naturally begin to use multiple social applications, whether that’s social networks, blogs, microblogs, content aggregators, or whatever. The natural consequence of that is fragmentation, which, in the current “walled garden” phase of the Web, creates all sorts of hassles, inconvenience, and missed opportunity for richer interaction.

Surprisingly, he did not mention MessageDance. We also demonstrated this by releasing working examples.

Relentless innovation is the only way out to consistently rise above competing solutions. I wish industry thought leaders compare vendors on their merit and not on their pedigree.

Blogged with MessageDance using Gmail