schmoozy space Mark Szpakowski's szpace blog

Nancy White posts about needing an easy to use blog community. I think hers is a classic use case, with some key details including:

• inexpensive or free
• easy to use for non-techies
• individual blog for each user
• group blog aggregating individual blogs

Surprisingly enough, there's nothing out there that really fits the bill. Here at coachingplatform I'm working toward that, integrating the Blojsom weblog server with coachingplatform's user-centric, multi-topic workspaces. However, there's a ways to go, especially regarding usability, about which I learned a lot from a recent experience offering a multi-user private blog inside a coachingplatform topic for a group of teenagers.

What we'll be offering:

• a public blog for each user, to which you can post from inside coachingplatform or using your favorite blogging client (e.g., Netnewswire, the Performancing Firefox plugin, ...). This is pretty much ready to go.
• for each coachingplatform topic, a private multi-user topic blog, visible only to the participants of that topic. Any of them can post to it, and only they can see it. The use case for this is teams working or playing together, where they want to share with each other but not with the whole world
• for each topic, a public multi-user topic blog, so the team or group can publish to the world. An outstanding example of such a blog is WorldChanging. We would offer much more: all the collaboration tools (libraries, discussions, web pages, courses) that come with each coachingplatform topic.

That leaves aggregating individual blogs (there's been some debate about how well this works - Drupal/CivicSpace, which do this, tend to quickly become messy and confusing), and - did I mention this :-) - ease of use!