Brij’s One More Idea

It’s a common complaint that if blogging was easier to do there will be more people doing it. Blog setup, blog posting, formatting, proof reading and post-post comment supervision, list of stuff to manage goes on and on. All that adds up to big drain on time. Its a hassle because it takes time. If we cut down time then we invite more people to do blogging.

One of my frustration is to see people who should be blogging not doing it because its still a hassle for them. These are people with great ideas and great projects. Question is what should we do to make these smart but time-challenged people get into the game. More time sharing great insights and less time gardening your blog.

We have been focusing a lot on these kind of people. Smart, time-challenged and not wiling to put up with lot of hassles. MessageDance email-based blog publishing model helps in that regard. Now email-to-blog model has been there for some time but it was implemented in a very kludgey way. Wasn’t optimized for mobile experience. You had to remember long email string and also had to keep it super secret. Remember the frustration when you want to blog some picture you saw on Flickr or video on YouTube. You are not going to remember that long email address at that time. Simple handle like blogs@messagedance.com solves that recall problem.

Best part of this approach is that it totally respects your current choice of tools - email, wordpress or blogger, or iPhone. Consider this announcement . Google News now supports iPhone. Now you can with just couple of iPhone clicks, link blog news article of your choice. Ease of publishing is extra-ordinary. MessageDance takes that link blog post one step further by showing snapshot in your blog and also leaving a twitter status update. Small bonus of “Reply on Twitter” comes with each link blog post. Give it a shot. You would be surprised with the ease of use.

I wish there was more innovation in the blog publishing tools category. Today Blogger rolled out future time stamped blog posts . For busy professionals, time to write blog is a real calendar challenge and now with this feature they can dump all their thoughtstream in one impulse phase and schedule the release. Thank you Blogger. I am sure wonderful team over at Wordpress will take this idea one step further.