Monday, May 19, 2003

Ever since I first heard about iBlog a few months ago, I've been wanting to take a look at it and write down my impressions. iBlog is Mac-only blogging software. It's built for OS X and sports the increasingly ubiquitous brushed metal interface. Because things have been kind of busy for me lately, I wasn't able to take a very detailed look at iBlog. I was half-afraid that the more I looked at it, the more likely I'd decide to dump my Salon/Radio blog for iBlog. I was very impressed. iBlog also has a built-in news aggregator. What struck me the most is how easy to understand the iBlog software is. I took a quick look at the various files that it created in my Mac's library and I could actually understand how it worked. I'm sure that this simplicity would make it that much easier to customize a blog. As much as I like the Radio Userland software, it's taken me a long time to understand how it works, and I've been blogging with it since last August. But on the other hand, iBlog is like Movable Type in that you need your own server to publish your blog on. But this could be a .Mac account, which is becoming an almost essential subscription for Mac users. Maybe it's because I'm a librarian, but I really liked the category feature in iBlog. It made assigning and organizing categories to be very easy. iBlog also generates an RSS feed - which is essential for blogging software, I think. I do have two negative things to say about iBlog. The first thing is that although I like its news aggregator, it provides no simple one-click method of posting items from the news aggregator to the blog. Radio Userland does this - and I thought that was the whole point of having blogging software integrated with a news reader. It is very likely that this omission will be fixed in future releases of iBlog, so this is not a huge problem. My other concern is more of a social rather than a technological issue, but it's real and is the major reason why I don't switch to iBlog tonight. It's that iBlog is so relatively new and has not yet established a community of users. I've talked about blogging communities before (see Digression2). Although I think one's blogging software is a very loose and less significant community, it does count for something. Maybe it's also because most of the time I feel quite at home in the Salon blog community. Anyway, I'll finish by recommending iBlog to anyone starting a new blog on a Mac (OS 10.2). Because it's on a Mac and the software is very Mac-like, you won't waste as much time figuring out the technology and can spend more time being creative. 10:02:47 PM