Next generation blogging tools
: Answering Dave Winer’s invitation and challenge, here is a first wishlist of functionalityi for the next generation of blogging tools (more to come):
: A tool so incredibly simple any child or non-Internet, non-PC user could figure out immediately how to use it: Oh, I put this there and I can get to it from anywhere.
“This” can be text, a photo, a sound, a video, a shopping list, a school paper, anything.
“Put” can mean type or drag-and-drop or even the dreaded “browse.”
“Get” can mean that from a simple address on a simple page, I can find this thing again or send my friends there to find it.
“Anywhere” means it should be accessible from the web or mobile phones or RSS or whatever.
: The tool should be easily translated into ANY language on earth. That is how we will change this world, when blogging tools work in Arabic and Korean and Chinese of various stripes and Balkan languages and such.
: Distributed posting. My blog should be not only what I put on my blog but what I put elsewhere — a comment on your blog, an article in the paper, a review on Amazon, a song on iTunes. My blog should be able to aggregate all the things I create anywhere with nothing more than a simple identification that it’s mine.
: I want to be able to publish video easily but without going bankrupt on bandwidth (p2p time).
: I want a one-size-fits-all ping: Ping this site and it will, in turn, ping everybody else. Pinging is getting to be time-consuming. No reason it can’t be standardized and worked out in a cooperative P2P relationship among all the pingees.
: Jay Rosen‘s request: He wants the tool to list all the links he uses (because, he says, this will create the curriculum for a course).
: I also want the tool to compile all the links I use to tell me which sites are the most fruitful for my linking; this is another way to prioritize and value my blogroll.
: Make it easy to post from any mobile device at any length with any media type.
: Make it easy to read from any mobile device.
: Give me very, very powerful tools for managing comments: Let me see all comments, all comments today, all comments from a given commenter, all comments that use this word…
: Let readers see just comments from those who use their identities (or all comments).
: Allow the option of threaded comments (to deal with the size of a BlogFor America).
: The problem with tracking blog links is that we assume they are all positive. Of course, many are negative. We want to capture that difference. Technorati has a suggested standard but it requires tagging smarts. Build it into the tool: Instead of one link button, give me three: positive, negative, neutral.
: I want to drag and drop material from a web page into my blog post: Put this here, put that there. I’d like split-screen blogging: web page on the right; blog post in the same browser on the left (so I don’t have to keep toggling back and forth) and I can mark anything and drop it over with a link included.
: Failing the idea above, I want somebody to get a good means of multiple cut-and-pastes, so I can in one swoop get all the quotes and links I want from a web page and insert them into my browswer in whatever order makes sense (without having to remember them all). So let me cut a dozen quotes and links and then show them to me in my blog tool and let me insert each easily. That is far more fluid that what I have to do now: go to browser, cut, go to blog, paste, go to browser, cut, go to blog, paste….
: For the good of this new medium and industry, create standard traffic measurement for weblogs so we know who reads what when. We want to know that for our egos. Advertisers will want to know that. We can show the way for every other medium, online and off, and create great and standard reporting tools. It will benefit everyone.
: Create hooks for each post that can be used — at the blogger’s will, of course — for targeted searching and targeted ad calls (e.g., find all posts this guy wrote about this; put ads on posts this guy wrote about that).
: Extend David Galbraith‘s one-line-bio to allow bloggers to put up resumes and life stories and personal ads, whatever they choose. Let them describe themselves as well as their work and let them be found.
: Create automated, intuitive categorization of posts, with manual override (e.g., let the system guess that this post is about blogging and technology).
: Find new words that will make sense to the world for “RSS” and “permanlink” and “XML” and “blogroll.”
: Let me reverse-subscribe my blog — that is, let me contribute it or certain posts to a conference blog without anyone having to go to the effort to compile and aggregate posts from that conference. If I wanted to say that I have a relevant blog for an event or a cause or a candidate, let me join in with one click (and if someone is running or moderating that aggregation, let them decide whether to let me into the club).
: When I come to something interesting, I often wonder whether it has already been blogged to death (and what others are saying about it) before I decide whether I want to blog it. So I’d like to see a distributed Technorati, a page rank with substance: When looking at a NY TImes story, I see that 23 bloggers have blogged it and with a click, I can see who has blogged it and what they say.
What else?
: UPDATE: Add Howard Rheingold’s good request for better blog comments, including the ability to subscribe to a thread and keep the discussion going.
