May 25, 2002
So I checked out
So I checked out Radio Userland today as a blogging tool. I found it is a lot more community-centric than blogger is. Its user experience puts you right in the middle of an interface that encourages you to act similarly to tons of other bloggers, the kinds of bloggers that post a lot of links, have other bloggers reading their blogs, and read lots of articles.Blogger doesn't specifically encourage you to do that. Maybe it does culturally, but it doesn't technically. With Blogger, I just post to my blog from anywhere I want. I blog from my mozilla sidebar, I blog from my AIM buddy list, I blog from my linux terminal window in a vi session. I can even blog from my palm pilot (to be published when I hit "sync").
To be fair, all those things are possible with Radio Userland. And to be fair, all the things that Radio Userland offers in its user experience are just as possible with Blogger. But it's more a matter of what each software puts at your fingertips by default, and what each software requires you to go out and do by yourself.
For me, my best match might just end up being Radio Userland. I like the flexibility that Blogger gives me, and most Radio Userland users wouldn't have that flexibility. However, I'm a programmer, and the backend functionality of all blogging software is extensible enough by programmers that I could do what I wanted with Radio Userland.
And I like what I saw of Userland. I like that it will pull down site headlines of all your favorite blogs. I like that it pulls in headlines of hundreds of other user sites, and I like that you can rank them and sort them by your own criteria. I like that it shows you which blogs are most popular on a daily basis, and that it can show you what other people seem to be talking (blogging) about on a day-to-day basis. I like that it feels more hooked in to a community, which makes your own blog more relevant to a community, which might give me a larger readership.
But... I'm still thinking about it. It's still canned desktop software.
And it requires a pc or mac. So it'll have to wait until I get my ibook
anyway. (I'll be getting the 700mhz 12.1" screen I believe.)
Posted by Curt at May 25, 2002 11:59 PM