Tech Goes Boom

Dot Blog

Another one of the suggestions I made while at Apple, and never seemed to find an ear was one that I still think is good: .Mac should offer basic blogging.

Bear with me here.

Apple introduced .Mac to offer at home users an easy way to share their photos and movies with their friends and family. This was one of it's main functions along with disc storage and email. The way that .Mac handles easy photo publishing on the web remains a very cool thing.

Back when blogging was still called "keeping a personal website", the idea was the same. Let people know what you're up to without necessarily having to spam people with impersonal mailing lists. But the knowledge of HTML required kept a lot of people from engaging in this practice. Fast forward to 2004. Now we have a Google owned Blogger, and Typepad as two heavy hitters in the easy as pie, publish your life on the web game. Why can't .mac users just use one of these guys?

Well they could. But their friends and family already know the URL of their .mac website, know their .mac e-mail address. They are already paying 99 bucks a year for these online services. Plus, along side an easy posting tool like Ecto, .Mac blogging could be so simple that grandma could do it.

What's in this for Apple? For one, it keeps people in the .Mac space. They are less likely to give up that dot mac account when their families are looking to that web space for their family news fix. Also, it's free advertising for their products every time someone sees their customer's blogs. Apple could license a version of MT to run on their servers, and customize it for easy of use. Very little over head, get payoff for the users. It offers more value for dot mac with very little investment on Apple's part.

Just as a side note: There is a little app called iBlog that shoehorns a pure static blog into your .mac web directory and allows for most of the functionality of a blog. This is pretty cool. But it doesn't allow for comments. That's a killer in my book. You can host your comments on third party servers, and provide a somewhat seamless experience, but the whole point is to make this easy.